When communication networks change, the power that be no longer holds a monopoly on truth. Collective illusions that provide stability get shattered and one arrives at a point of epistemological crisis. Throw in endless data sets and 24/7 streaming of conflicts of different kinds, and the result is a society that reduces nuance and thrives on emotion.

This is how technological progress can degrade social cohesion as the collective becomes more primitive, even if the individual’s ability to attain and express knowledge is greater. It is a form of scale transformation property; greater optionality on the individual level leads to increased loss of social cohesion at the aggregate level.

As the individuals cannot cope with the newly found freedom, their minds get hijacked by algorithms that optimize for conflicts. And as the majority of discourse becomes confrontational and the overinformed mind cannot verify truth in the sheer amount of noise, the ideology becomes a decisive criterion for navigating the world.

In such a society, the majority becomes Wittgenstein’s ruler. What people say and think tells you nothing about the subject debated but merely informs you about their own beliefs and ideology. The “global village” everybody was thrown into is a very primitive village.

The emergence of the rapid (“hot”) media, television, and then the internet, made every topic an everyman problem. The internet provided additional options to engage. If you involve too many people and give them the ability to engage, you sow endless discontent and conflict.

Amplifying Victimization

It seems that everything that has undergone “socialization” online is doomed. Askonas suggests that the invention of hot media potentially lowers the ability to produce and adopt meaningful technological innovation, as there’s always somebody being a priori threatened.

“…the decline of actual innovation and the rise of a digital simulation of it is largely a story of the end of the print era and the advent of instantaneous electronic communication and the environment it generates. Print, a classic “cold” medium, could tell its readers of new scientific wonders, but could not grab their sensorium with two hands and shake them about. The radio, the newsreel, the television, the Twitter bring to one’s immediate presence not just the immediate terror of some tech­nologized violence, but also the equally disequilibrating chit-chattering of the terrorized.”

This is how the victims, albeit only a minority, and perhaps sometimes justified, hijack the discourse, embedding it in a deadlock and potentially lowering our ability to invent, innovate, or truly progress. This is how social media allows the tyranny of the minority on a massive scale.

Taleb’s concept of “tyranny of the minority” suggests that it takes only ~4% stubborn, uncompromising people to force the remaining ~96% to eat, behave, or live according to their rules because the flexible majority will always bend first. And the victims are always the ones motivated to impose their inflexibility on the rest.

Some are victims of bad immigration policy, while others are victims of authoritarian regimes cracking down on immigration. Some are victims of the murderous apartheid regime, and others are victims of a fanatical terrorist nation.

The (social) media constantly streams a story of victims. It is unfortunate, but a reality of not living in a utopia that there always are (potential) victims. It is understandable that the victims are intolerant of their suffering and rush to hijack the discourse. That, however, only embeds the impasse deeper, throwing the state of discourse into a total war.

Problems > Solutions

Problems are simple while solutions always require nuance and usually a great leap of faith. Problems lend themselves greatly to virality; they are often emotionally charged and absolute, while solutions, complex and often iterative, are a product of tinkering (nuanced insight) and require reduction of outrage.

Problems: max emotion and reduced nuance

Solutions: max tinkering and reduced outrage

Another way to frame this is to borrow from Brandolini’s law also called the bullshit asymmetry principle states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

In other words, it’s trivial and quick to invent nonsense, make wild claims, spread misinformation, or throw out unfounded assertions. But debunking or carefully refuting them usually requires far more time, research, expertise, patience, and effort (explaining context, sourcing evidence, dismantling multiple intertwined falsehoods, etc.).

There is a related asymmetry in a law that would state:

The amount of energy needed to produce a solution is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to highlight problems.

Hence, the online discourse will always be prone to hijacking by problems and the intolerant minority. Involving more people only means a greater chance of highlighting problems and inviting stalemate into society’s issues.

As the grand topics now invite everybody to express their views, the “hot” social media always emphasize problems over solutions, pessimism over optimism. After all, it’s called doomscrolling for a reason.

Pessimism is a societal-level victim mentality. Our society grew more pessimistic, and pessimism is rewarded as high status. It is more respectable to be skeptical, highlighting the problems and the gloom. Unfortunately, unlike optimism, pessimism is always self-fulfilling. Solving problems, or in other words, employing creativity, is very difficult and rare.

Madness And Mimesis

In the last big epistemological crisis ushered in by the technological revolution, the total war was so exhausting that Europe had to abandon the fundamental question of the nature of God. The Peace of Westphalia was the pivotal moment that resolved the conflict by agreeing to avoid answering the question, as Thiel narrates in the Straussian Moment:

“Where agreement over questions of virtue, the good life, and the true religion was unraveling, the immediate attempt involved forging such an agreement through force. This force escalated in the periods of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, and culminated the paroxysm of the Thirty Years’ War, which remains perhaps the most deadly period in the history of Europe.”

At the end the agreement had become more elusive and the differences were greater than ever. “The violence failed to create a new unity”. Thiel adds a framing of the Enlightenment undertaking a major strategic retreat” as...the question of human nature was abandoned because it is too perilous a question to debate.”

The Enlightenment led us into the 21st century. Perhaps we’re stumbling upon the same question again. In the centuries after Westphalia, it provided a solid ground in which a new scientific reality was nested. But as the knowledge grew wider, in the words of Durant, “the common man found himself forced to choose between a scientific priesthood mumbling unintelligible pessimism, and a theological priesthood mumbling incredible hopes.”

In my interpretation, the theological priesthood of Durant’s era was rapid technological progress. Big ideas were executed: atomic, nuclear, reaching the moon, and beyond. We were not supposed to go that far. This progress was founded on science, but then science turned into a bureaucracy. A bureaucrat is always a pessimist because, in their view, the world cannot get better; it can only be better managed. We lost the counterweight to pessimism.

And Durant goes on with a warning that deeply resonates when assessing the discourse of recent years:

“For if knowledge became too great for communication, it would degenerate into scholasticism, and the weak acceptance of authority; mankind would slip into a new age of faith, worshiping at a respectful distance its new priests.”

There simply is no answer that would satisfy the intolerant minority, the ubiquitous victims, those who cite endless studies or data on data, or those who support counter-movements thriving on conspiracy theories and demagogy. All news is fake news.

It is a total war of narratives and interpretation with no absolute answers. We live in an era of nonstop competition for the right to interpret vast amounts of information to conquer truth. Consensus does not exist. Polarization is a feature, and motivated reasoning is a default method.

Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information in ways that favor conclusions you want to be true, rather than conclusions supported by the best available evidence. Tribal epistemology takes motivated reasoning and scales it to group identity. The more the tribes fight, the more they become alike.

It’s similar to an industry with excessive competition. The individual companies struggle as profits get outcompeted. In a broader society, there are too many involved in the competition of debate; the solutions die in the heat of it. The solutions are a prerogative of monopolies on which they rise and fall, and tend to be discovered away from the attention.

The more minds involved, the more likely victimization, overoptimizing for problems, and catering to the lowest common denominator. Solutions are rarely visible and clear prospectively. Factor in the cacophony of data and the optionality of its interpretation, and you’re never allowed to solve anything.

Askonas talks about creative problem-solving (paraphrasing Albert Hirschmann’s “hiding hand”) as an individual’s tendency and ability to misjudge risk. This comes with an upside asymmetry while the collective tendency to inhibit this “power of misjudging” kills creative problem-solving.

“In fields of human endeavor which require creativity and invention, no purely rational calculus of costs and benefits based on a realistic assessment of the starting conditions could ever justify taking action. But, in the social aggregate, this would result in a severe underestimation of the transformative power of human ingenuity.”

The understanding of Westphalia as a strategic retreat that followed up by the Enlightenment, reducing humanity to a flattened model of “homo economicus”. The rational economic actor driven primarily by self-interest and material incentives omits that “odd people are commonplace and capable of asserting themselves with explosive force, then the account of politics that pretends they do not exist needs to be reexamined.”

On one hand, as Thiel intends it, this is a warning against threats of fanatic fundamentalism that does not answer the higher truth of economic realities (Thiel alluded to Bin Laden, I’m alluding to ideologies such as degrowth). But the “explosive force” is also an example of a more optimistic and positive inventing capacity of individuals.

This is the true hidden battle. It’s the shackles of collective disillusionment with infinite problems and the individual desire for personal quests that do not reconcile with the dogmas imposed by the collective.

Data proliferating far beyond us being able to reverse-engineer it into knowledge is today’s big challenge. The discourse is hijacked by fanatic fundamentalism, referring to the ultimate truth of science and its high priests. That what calls itself science today does not necessarily practice it despite having the “official” authority to do so.

We are required to reframe what science is. In “Science without Validation in a World Without Meaning” Doughtry summarizes this problem:

“Beneath the surface, however, the ubiquity of science in political debate may be a symptom of its decline, of a loss of confidence and authority. The success of science during the three centuries since Newton’s Principia of 1687 is unrivaled by any intellectual endeavor in human history. But the epistemology behind those scientific achievements is being disregarded on a grand scale. Science as knowledge is increasingly ignored. Data mining looks like science to the extent that it involves mathematical functions and data. What is missing, however, is the connection between mathematics and verifiable prediction—between mind and phenomena—that gives the whole thing meaning. But if meaning is denied a priori, then why care about science?”

What truly constitutes science, as put forth by David Deutsch, is this open-ended, fallible pursuit of ever-better explanations. It is not a credentialed priesthood, nor a bureaucratic accumulation of data points, nor a consensus enforced by peer review or institutional prestige. Science as knowledge means rejecting the idea of authority.

The path forward lies not in collective consensus or in surrendering to the cacophony of competing narratives, but in a deliberate individual and personal strategic retreat analogous to Westphalia: one that cedes the illusion of unified authority over truth to the individual capacity for genuine knowledge creation.

A return to God as a personal rediscovery of transcendent meaning outside the primitivism of “global village”. A rebirth of spiritual individualism, belief in things others don’t, amid secular data overload. It’s easy to care for things that matter.

True heroes fight for things that don’t matter.

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As a crypto investor who’s watched mostly ruin and fleeting conquest since then, I may be biased. But the pattern is hard to ignore: the frontier that once rewarded audacity is now unable to produce any.

The online once was the ultimate playground for innovation. Code cost almost nothing to ship, barriers could be smashed before the regulators even noticed, and the ambitious flocked there as the natural Schelling point for enacting change.

That (relative) Wild West started closing around 2016, when Trump’s victory was loudly proclaimed the first election won online. Governments and regulators pounced fast. From then on, the creep of controls over speech, platforms, and digital power accelerated the transformation of the open terrain into a minefield.

The killing stroke was amplified by generative AI. Content creation costs cratered to zero in a world where distribution was already free. The floodgates opened, not to enlightenment, but to slopification: mass-produced content for content’s sake.

Drowning in an endless soap-opera feed every minute of the day is now understood as “staying informed”. LLMs widened the gap between life and knowledge into a chasm. Sloplification led to zombification.

Crypto, on the other hand, still carries a shadow of an ambition because it’s disobedient by design. It forges new coordination mechanisms, challenges creaking institutions, by enabling dissent. That’s how society creates progress. My belief is that the most transformative technologies enable dissent (e.g. printing press, internet).

But lately the vision of crypto got captured by purely financial engineering, attracting regulatory scrutiny that successfully co-opted and tamed the original, more revolutionary impulse by trapping it within the existing financial and political machine.

The online hit its peak in the deliriously indefinite-optimistic Web3 mania of 2021 that remained niche relative to what came after. Then GPT slop rolled in, and utopia curdled into a zombie dystopia of Citrin’s vision.

How To Bloom

The online seems more like indefinite pessimism than ever: let’s entertain ourselves until the end comes in the drama of the endless conflict porn, infinite optimization loops, and zero-sum attention wars. Building in the world of online is not as impactful as it once was.

Meanwhile, the opportunity is slowly returning to the world of atoms. This isn’t just a pivot to hard tech like manufacturing, energy, and defense; it includes the resurgence of localism, domestic supply chains, reshoring, and the human-scale economy that was hollowed out by decades of digital abstraction.

Political volatility in recent years rammed home a brutal truth: physical security underpins everything. The ground we thought was solid turned out to be quicksand, and people noticed.

I like to frame this pivot optimistically: from indefinite doom to definite bloom. The catalysts are straightforward. Online saturation of regulation, slop, and novelty burnout has made digital feel like a dead end. You might be able to spin clawdbot to make better spreadsheets but the fact that fixing your leaking sink costs $500 and two week wait does remind you post-scarcity is a pipe dream.

Purpose-driven builders are peeling away from B2B SaaS treadmills, AI hype trains, and perpetual financial engineering. Finance is inherently indefinite, money stops being a means and becomes the end itself. Crypto fell into that same trap, and it repels those who want to enact tangible change rather than shuffle digits in a casino.

I don’t want to go as far as saying that the future is a rejection of the digital. It’s a re-engineering, as the definite bloom will require a better, more secure digital layer focused not on distraction, but on the security and resilience of the physical: from industrial control software to a secure, credibly neutral financial system.

On The Pendulum

New political realities have shattered the fantasy of endless, unquestioned globalization. Cracks appeared after the 2008 financial crisis, widened with Brexit and Trump in 2016, and split open under COVID’s revelation of bureaucratic brittleness and authoritarian reflexes. Alternative truths bypassed legacy gatekeepers, forcing governments into clumsy coercion.

Then 2022’s war on Europe’s doorstep imposed cold realpolitik on leaders who’d mistaken weakness for moral superiority. The re-election of Donald Trump served as a jolt to the system.

Globalization couldn’t coast forever: its narrative fractured, and too many weren’t better off. Innovation had frozen in atoms, diverted into financial gadgets and digital escapism while real industries atrophied. The global view always favors top-down and centralized, but bottom-up and decentralized will proliferate in the near future.

That long neglect now begs reinvention, radical upgrades to infrastructure, production, resilience, and security. Suddenly, outbuilding the competition in the physical world matters again. Decades of neglect in the physical world: the infrastructure, industry, supply chains, and hard security have left gaping opportunities for builders with drive and desire to enact change.

Technology sets society’s invisible rules, as inexorable as physics. The online reshaped them as radically as the printing press did. Gutenberg unleashed Luther and centuries of epistemological bloodshed; today’s digital substrate has ignited its own crisis of authority and truth. Only now it targets the state, not the church. We live in the times of epistemological battle not dissimilar to the 16th and 17th century.

The online has done its disruptive work. The real battlefield is shifting to atoms: clear rules, hard scarcities, human fears and limits. Although I do not believe in scarcity of human ingenuity the political regimes calculate with what is not what might be. That realism is lighting the fuse on an arms race: economic, technological, and geopolitical.

I don’t buy inevitability. Doom is not a given and a hot war isn’t destined to take place. McLuhan wrote that “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” Throw in cheap, scalable fusion or some other black-swan breakthrough, and the whole script flips

The Founders Fund quip of “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” perfectly nailed the peak online. The pendulum is swinging back. The posterboys of SpaceX, Anduril, and the next wave of atom-builders are the vanguard. This could only be the beginning.

The above might have been an overomanticized narrative as the future of innovation will not be frictionless. The world of atoms is not the same open-source, low-capital playgrounds that the internet once was. The new frontier of atoms has a much higher barrier to entry.

The hidden battle entrepreneurs will fight is in ensuring that the ambition to build and innovate in the physical world remains open to ambitions of individuals and does not remain a privilege of those that come with an aura of (institutional) pre-importance.

This pivot to the physical world, while vital, presents its own high-stakes battlefield: access and belief that it can be achieved.

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I recently learned that your opportunity is what others are complacent about. Just as people in the past were complacent about an alternative monetary regime while Bitcoin percolated from an absolute niche ideological nerd-snipe into the mainstream, people today are complacent, holding their bags, assuming a greater fool will save them.

Crypto used to be proactive; it has since become reactionary. After the early “startupization” that followed Ethereum’s rise, the space expanded rapidly in both ideation and valuation. The hubris peaked in 2021, and today crypto is no longer the frontier it once was.

Over the years, most players became conditioned to believe that mere participation was enough to outperform other asset classes. Scale ended that illusion. Participation alone is no longer sufficient. The lesson of the past two years is simple: mature or die. The industry needs to move forward, but most people remain stuck, optimizing for wishful thinking instead of reality.

Hypercompetition and Imitation

Game theory describes the current state of crypto as an inadequate Nash equilibrium. Everyone is optimizing for a win in a game that is not positive-sum (not Pareto-optimal). It’s hard for any single player to break out because the incentives to do so have disappeared. In Scott Alexander’s words:

“In a way, it’s this very lack of free energy, this intense competition without space to draw breath, that keeps the inadequacy around and makes it non-fragile.”

The “free energy” here is money (incentive), and the “inadequacy” is the sticky zero-sum game of people repeating the same playbook. Investors chase short-term wins, which pushes founders toward short-term ambitions, and vice versa—a vicious feedback loop. Everyone optimizes for immediate extraction because, economically, it should make sense (even if it’s diminishing at scale).

The only way to escape such an equilibrium is at the individual level: a founder or team that delivers genuine innovation and shifts the incentive structure so the whole system can advance. Yet crypto has been systematically drained of innovation by the dominant incentives of the past four or five years.

To parrot Peter Thiel, we should think of competition as imitation. Imitation feels like validation—doing what others do, desiring what others desire. No wonder everyone in crypto is building the same things: L1s, L2s, DEXes, CEXes, stablecoins, prediction markets, using the same distribution playbooks to sell to the same audiences.

The most attractive pitch has become: “We’re the same (nodding to some existing successful project) but not the same (highlighting a minor technical nuance).” It comforts both investors and founders while exaggerating a difference that is more imaginary than real.

(If you want a similar explanation of these dynamics, this X post does a decent job.)

The Friends We Made Along the Way

Three key memes embody the fallacious thinking that keeps the industry stuck and breeds complacency.

The 4-Year Cycle

If paradise is guaranteed, why bother trying? This is the worst of the memes. One that promises divine intervention will save even the worst sinners. When success feels preordained, effort becomes half-hearted at best. Relying on greater-fool theory only underscores the reactionary ethos: no agency, just waiting for institutions to buy our bags.

Hyperfinancialization

Many have built products and investment theses around hyperfinancialization. Taken as a standalone assumption, it becomes a bet on an infinite gambling TAM. The implicit message: “There are no real problems to solve; users just want to entertain themselves to death.”

This peak expression of indefinite thinking ignores the fact that entertainment and gambling are already saturated markets outside the convoluted crypto pitch. Innovative financial engineering that actually unlocks value for users might have a place, but gambling for gambling’s sake or trading for trading’s sake is self-referential gaslighting.

Web3

The false Web2 vs. Web3 dichotomy is an oversimplistic analogy that hijacked people’s minds. It triggered the “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mindset, leading builders to take every existing internet service and assume “putting it on blockchain” automatically makes it better.

Skeuomorphism prevents net-new creation. It makes people stare at the old world and declare things like “the social graph needs to be onchain.” It created a blind spot: blockchain is fundamentally a financial graph, and it may not be the right substrate for things like social media.

Whenever someone says “Web3” these days, I suspect they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. There is no such place—it’s just an ideology in search of a problem. That’s a suboptimal way to build truly useful services.

What Will Truly Matter in 10 Years

I dislike lumping Bitcoin together with the rest of crypto; the motivations differ profoundly even if they share an origin. Bitcoin has always been revanchist, wanting to be proven right once, when everything else collapses. The original “world computer” vision of Ethereum (and what followed) was more ambitious and centered on value creation (novel form of networked businesses).

It’s uncanny how a movement founded on rejecting fiat spawned a subculture whose growth now depends on ever more fiat flooding in. The more fiercely foes fight, the more they resemble each other.

The bitcoin religion is reformed by Michael Saylor, and the change of guard is symbolically embodied by the OG “100k sell wall”. The boomerification of bitcoin and the incoherent hyperfinancialization technobabble of the rest of crypto leaves us in limbo.

Short-term expectations never beat long-term fundamentals. Anyone who wants to build and capture real value in this space has to focus on the obvious: value creation. The overcrowded once-frontier must consolidate. Only innovation, not imitation masquerading as competition, can drive further expansion.

But it’s not over; it’s just a new era. A new era demands new skills, new talent, and new ideas, because very few existing players are able or willing to adapt. You can’t build a strong industry on the soft habits of short-term expectations and astrology.

Among the ruins of shattered expectations, look for those who keep delivering quietly—who get better instead of bitter. It’s not about the spotlight; it’s about realizing that people need better plans when staring at the wreckage of their past decisions, and about refining judgment independently of the noise.

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To me he embodies something what Nassim Taleb would call a “soul in the game”. This represents an existential, intrinsic commitment where one’s work is tied to personal pride, ethics, and a sense of mission, often making financial considerations secondary.

Taleb contrasts it with purely profit-driven or industrialized approaches, emphasizing that it involves putting one’s heart and identity into the endeavor. He notes that progress often requires “an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game,” where a small number of deeply committed individuals can drive significant change.

The Hero We Deserve

Having been forced to take time off in recent weeks, I indulged in the escapist realm of the internet to pass the time, with YouTube being my platform of choice. Given my lifelong interest in all things gym-related, I tend to be fed gym content. Sam Sulek had been on my radar for a while, but I never really gave him much attention.

What I’ve noticed in the past is that people compile Sam’s videos into zany content like “8 hours of Sam Sulek car talk to fall asleep to.” Essentially, it’s an unfiltered stream of Sam’s thoughts in his car on the way to and from the gym. For the uninvolved, it must be unfathomable how this type of content could amass so many views and a cult-like following.

His raw, unfiltered thoughts are delivered in a Marcus Aurelius-like meditative manner, akin to someone speaking to themselves. There’s a striking lack of performance and aspiration, an absolute and genuine disregard for what the zeitgeist dictates.

The substance here lies in the presentation itself rather than the content, which is mostly repetitive rambling. It’s not that people can’t find in it something of value to them. But the value is not trying to cater to anybody’s expectation (at least that’s how I assume it started). It’s simply good vibes.

I realized what a stark contrast this is to the performative, shock-value, aspirational content that dominates my feed. Here you have this young man, totally enamoured with what the majority would call a mundane and repetitive lifestyle or craft, throwing unscripted and unfiltered thoughts into the void. It’s a rare instance of “soul in the game” at its peak, broadcasted and consumed en masse.

The Anti-Content

I grew resentful of my social media feed, finding it tiresome. Perhaps it’s just me, but any shred of genuineness feels long gone, replaced by a relentless pursuit of eyeballs and engagement. Everybody seems to optimize for the process of distribution.

The industrialization of the information flow makes me feel like there’s little value in watching the timeline unfold. There’s nothing to learn from information that presents itself as guidance. Can it be a signal if it craves relevancy? I’m skeptical about products manufactured to compete in the attention market.

I truly believe that information or content that’s worth my time is not produced in the way that is presented as worthy or optimizes for attention by forcing itself into the feed. If it’s trying too hard it’s not attractive.

Hence why alpha is so rare and cannot be systematized (also why the best pitch does not look like a pitchdeck). Most information, even when presented as a hack, advice or a how-to, is usually only worth its entertainment value. (Which is ok.)

Content that is designed as motivational or aspirational packaged in a form of readymade advice is junkfood of information. People don’t get sharper. They grow duller even if they have absorbed more information. This is the sort of knowledge which overconsumption leads to chaos.

On social media the mind is getting fed with a performative act that often optimizes for conflict and outrage. One is drawn into having an opinion and feeling strongly about topics so distant yet somehow so relevant. People care about the things of great importance, mostly negative things as well. But they often forget what truly matters.

That is, anybody can fight for things that truly matter. To paraphrase Peter Thiel: true heroes fight for things that don’t matter, a reason as thin as an eggshell.

The mimetic force mobilizes masses to aspire to the same thing, believe in the same virtues, fight for the same cause. Enemies growing more alike. It is rarely the heat of competition forging the path forwards. It is individuals like Sam Sulek on their way to fight for their personal “petty” mission.

Face/Off is a 90s movie classic that tells a story of an FBI agent, Sean Archer, undergoing an experimental face-swapping procedure to impersonate notorious criminal Castor Troy to thwart a terrorist plot. However, when Castor awakens and assumes Archer’s identity, a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse ensues, with each man trapped in the other’s body, navigating their rival’s life while racing to reclaim their own.

When Sean Archer and Castor Troy swap faces, and thus lives, they embody the existential dilemma of becoming the “other”. Archer grapples with the chaotic freedom of Troy’s villainy, while Troy revels in the structured facade of Archer’s domesticity.

This inversion suggests that identity is performative, shaped by environment and choice rather than innate essence, blurring the lines between good and evil as each man confronts the shadow self within, ultimately implying that vengeance and redemption are two sides of the same coin.

The swapped faces represent deceptive shadows masking deeper truths; the characters’ journeys force a reckoning with authenticity versus appearance, highlighting how societal roles, personal traumas and ambitions imprison the soul.

All roles, imposed through norms, are a prison which tames the human will. However, they provide stability for society to function. It is always a matter of time until the will breaks free, ushering in chaos, only to rebuild stability anew.

A Vessel: Crypto Identity Crisis

I have come to believe that technology is the substrate on which society plays out. The technology creates a mostly invisible environment, a network, that is like a theatre with its own physical and other, more abstract rules.

When I first engaged with crypto, it was by reading the Ethereum whitepaper in 2016. To me, this was a fundamental change in how human society can govern itself. Then I read Nick Szabo’s thoughts on Social Scalability, reflecting my own scattered thoughts comprehensively.

In today’s discourse, blockchains are reduced to a database solution and trust minimization is considered an ideology. Everybody follows the money, but money, in this case, leads to a dead end. Slowly, we are eroding trust minimization requirements, first for performance, then for a use case, to finally pander to whatever makes the governments and corporations buy more.

If crypto were a character in a movie, it would be a story of a techno-anarchist drug dealer who, through a cocaine-fueled career of being a Wall St. trader turned tech founder, became a JP Morgan board member summering in the Hamptons.

Two main memes sum up the current mood in crypto. One is “believe in something” which essentially reflects crypto’s inability to have a deterministic outlook on what it wants to achieve. “Something” should be understood as “nothing”. Price is all that matters.

The second meme is “pragmatism above all”. Centralized chains, single sequencers, performance optimization, censorship compliance and so on. Pragmatism slowly chips away at what is the actual unique selling point of crypto - trust minimization, enabling social scalability. In other words, the reduction for the trusted third party.

It truly seems that the revolution devours its children. The early revolutionaries became too wealthy to care, and today are reminiscent of the bankers they once revolted against. 2021 was about “the futur of France” on alternative financial rail, 2025 is about wrapping trust minimization machines into trust maximization vehicles and finding a willing buyer for hot air.

Indeed, it is all a game of tradeoffs. One cannot be a decentralization maximalist because that is impractical and almost impossible to commercialize. When the pendulum swings too much towards centralization one should realize the whole point is gone and we’re selling financialized nothing. In other words, financialization of financialization. Yield for the sake of yield.

This frames crypto as a vessel that is to be bought or sold, a means of hyperfinancialization. But crypto is not merely a vessel and is largely misunderstood that way. Crypto is an environment.

Going back to the first paragraph of this section, the substrate on which society plays out has been altered, and there’s no way back.

An Environment: The Electric Drama

Crypto will inevitably swallow everything that we perceive enables it to exist today. It is not a vessel - “a stock, but onchain”. It is totally and absolutely a whole new environment. An extension and transformation of markets, the invisible environment in which we participate. I’ll be relying on McLuhan to get this point across:

“The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions. The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.”

McLuhan saw already in the 1960s that print technology created the public, and the electric technology created the mass. He knew that the invisible environments were changing and so would society, but noted that the official culture was striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.

We cannot expect that individuals and authorities whose survival is tied to the old processes comfortably chugging along can either see the substance of the new environment or understand its nature.

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth-whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely “well-adjusted,” he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are.

This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” “Well-adjusted” courtiers, having vested interests, saw the emperor as beautifully appointed. The “antisocial” brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor “ain’t got nothin’ on.” The new environment was clearly visible to him.”

Hence, crypto finds itself in a conscious futile attempt to fit in, while unconsciously it has enabled a new world into which people, slowly but surely, opt in. While the industry rushes to fund the conformity machines, a minority of users silently dissents, living by the rules of new media.

“Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electronic informational media.”

The genuine adoption of crypto does not come from optimization. It stems from the desire to participate. Anybody could become a banker, and we can argue about the line that separates a bank and rug, a banker and a dev that rugged.

The internet arena and crypto even more so, switch the educational process from package to discovery. Instructions are no longer relevant; the manual has expired. McLuhan alluded that people reject goals and want roles. They crave involvement. If that was already true in the 1960s it is even more so today.

“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes. Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one’s environment…”

Face/On

In the spirit of Face/Off, crypto faces its own identity crisis. The true trust-minimized environment of enhanced social scalability is being challenged by a pervasive pragmatism or price action that reduces it to a mere financial vessel.

Just as Sean Archer and Castor Troy were forced to inhabit each other’s worlds, crypto’s pioneers are now grappling with the very systems they sought to disrupt, often adopting the centralized and trust-maximizing tendencies that take away their true substance and USP.

This tension between crypto as an environment and crypto as a vessel mirrors the core themes of the movie: authenticity versus appearance, and the blurring lines between revolution and assimilation. This is the “deceptive shadow” that masks crypto’s deeper truth, much like the swapped faces in Face/Off concealed the true identities beneath.

However, the “electric drama” of crypto, as McLuhan might describe it, continues to unfold beyond the attempts to force it into old paradigms. While official culture, including much of the crypto industry itself, strives to make the new media perform the work of the old, a minority of users unconsciously and silently dissents, opting into a new world built on different rules.

These are the “antisocial brats” who, unaccustomed to the old environment, might have an inkling that the emperor ain’t got nothin’ on. They represent the participation and involvement that drive crypto’s true adoption, rejecting mere optimization in favor of a new mythical engagement with the internet universe that is at people’s disposal.

Ultimately, the choice for crypto, much like the choice for Archer and Troy, is about reckoning with authenticity and embracing its transformative power. It is about understanding that crypto is not just a “stock onchain” or a database solution, but a fundamental alteration of the societal substrate.

A new environment of existing, thinking, creating, and engaging.

Thanks to Lachlan and longsolitude for their feedback.

As a crypto investor, I frequently analyze narratives to better grasp opportunities. With our industry at an inflexion point, poised to close the arbitrage gap in emerging technology markets, I find myself pondering how to uncover and inspire superior ideas and products.

Through Thiel’s lens, I see the crypto timeline as a progression: from the definite optimism of Bitcoin’s early days, to the indefinite optimism of Web3’s grand visions—settling on finance as the killer app—followed by the indefinite pessimism of the memecoin casino era, and now a strategic submission to regulatory clarity, which feels like definite pessimism.

The journey traces a path from cypherpunk ideals, through startup fervor, into degeneration, and ultimately toward standardization.

Is this arc universal across trends? A revolutionary idea, once partially validated, becomes a hyped panacea. When it fails to meet lofty expectations, it’s cursed, only to eventually settle into the status quo. The revolution doesn’t fully materialize, but we still ride (for some) a satisfying loop on Gartner’s hype cycle.

In crypto, the grand hype cycle is obscured by price volatility. Each crypto cycle—Bitcoin, ICOs promising a world computer, DeFi, memecoins, and now regulation and TradFi integration—seems like a fractal of a larger pattern. Right now, we’re in the Trough of Disillusionment. In Carlotta Perez’s technological surge framework we’re at the turning point.

Web3 promised to turbocharge Web2 profits, but onchain, decentralized, and tokenized. Yet, Web2 or Web3 isn’t a place—it’s not a distinct “thing.” As I noted a couple of years ago, it’s better understood as a “user preference,” and today, that preference remains niche. If you’re constantly referencing the old to explain the new, you’re not building something truly novel.

Crypto is no longer a frontier market, but opportunities still exist at the frontier of this now-established space. At this stage of maturity, where do the biggest wins lie? Intuitively, they come from growth-stage or late-mover advantages.

It’s also worth noting that centralized exchanges, once definite optimists championing crypto adoption, have turned into pessimists, now focused on defending their market share rather than advancing onchain adoption.

Successful exchanges, alongside L1s, generated the best returns for investors. Counterintuitively, the most competitive landscapes—where optimism faded into pragmatism—produced the biggest wins.

Does this mean there are no secrets left to uncover? I believe there are, and today’s secrets are yesterday’s lessons. Have we built many innovative, valuable companies or networks?

The low-hanging fruit has been picked—most projects either mimic what’s come before or remix it to feign originality. Too many solutions chase nonexistent problems, while others simply aim to replicate traditional finance onchain.

Crypto is an inherently revisionist force that failed at revolution. Today it grapples with a core (perhaps false) dilemma: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money?” In other words, do you sell out to the old regime at the price they’re willing to pay? Revolutionaries, weary of crying in the memecoin casino, are increasingly taking the offer.

Building indefinite things that builders thought users “ought to want” (no, people don’t want to own their data) and the clear success of centralized providers led to the current impasse. Definite optimists are nearly impossible to find in crypto today, but in that “nearly impossible” lies your chance to invest at the frontier.

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The rational investor in me argues that viewing crypto through traditional cycles is outdated as the industry matures. Yet the Girardian in me can’t escape the mythological patterns unfolding once again. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In this short essay, I explore how crypto bull markets play out in two acts: Act 1, followed by an intermezzo of “mimetic crisis,” then Act 2, culminating in a “sacrificial crisis.”

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Act 1 ignites with a price rally that unites the community in mimetic desire. The subsequent crash sparks chaotic, reciprocal violence—a figurative "all against all"—as internal conflict consumes the community.

Act 2 resolves this with renewed price surges, leading to the cycle’s end and the ultimate scapegoating. Each cycle dies from the excess of its foundational principle, and each has a scapegoat.

This reveals both a cyclical nature—this time it’s not different—and a linear progression—this time it actually is different. By the end, we’re always in a new place.

The ICO collapse left Ethereum desolate, only for DeFi summer to resurrect it. DeFi summer brought doubts on Bitcoins ability to become a financialized asset while Microstrategy and Blackrock restored it.

The 2017 bullmarket was an ICO-driven ETH frenzy. Ethereum’s world computer turned into a slot machine. As ICOs cashed out ETH, the computer crumbled onto itself, only to be resurrected in the 2020 DeFi mania, which ended with overlevered degens—Do, 3AC and SBF collapsing. The 2017 scapegoat was less individualized, nonetheless, it was real.

In 2017, Ethereum’s ICOs were both the source of prosperity and the cause of demise; in 2021, DeFi’s summer heroes followed the same arc. The best scapegoats are those who first bring wealth and celebration—like Ethereum’s ICO riches or DeFi’s unhinged lending and token printing, which minted millionaires by mere participation—only to become the reason for the fall.

Both the 2017 and 2021 bull markets unfolded in two distinct acts, separated by a striking parallel: a sharp price decline during the summers of 2017 and 2021. These intermezzos—brief but intense periods of retrenchment—interrupted the initial surges, only for the momentum to reignite with equal fervor in the second act, driven by new market leaders.

Mimetic Violence Escalation

During these intermezzos, mimetic violence turns inward as no scapegoat has yet emerged. A Girardian knows this "all against all" chaos is unsustainable; scapegoating later acts as a cleansing mechanism. But first, the violence unravels.

In 2017, the ICO boom and Bitcoin’s scaling woes triggered an early summer crash—Bitcoin fell from $2,700 to below $2,000, Ethereum from $400 to $150—igniting collective strife. The SegWit wars split Bitcoiners over block sizes, while the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork deepened the divide.

Ethereum’s ICO bubble soured, with users and developers blaming each other and the Foundation for congestion and scams. The Ethereum Classic (ETC) vs. ETH clash flared—ETC, touting a "pure" vision, surged tenfold from June to August—while miner-user fee disputes further fractured the community.

In 2021, a similar pattern emerged after the May crash—Bitcoin dropped from $64,000 to $30,000, Ethereum from over $4,000 to $1,700—spurred by Elon Musk’s Bitcoin critique and China’s crackdown.

Violence erupted across a more complex landscape: Ethereum’s gas fee woes fueled scaling debates between Layer 1 and Layer 2 factions; the Bitcoin Mining Council divided purists and pragmatists; DeFi’s yield farming implosion (e.g., Iron Finance) turned degens against each other; and Tether’s FUD intensified stablecoin rivalries.

The Second Act

Through a Girardian lens, these intermezzos are inflection points: Act 1’s dominant performers collapse under unsustainable excess, sparking internal violence, until Act 2 redirects desire to new assets, delaying the final scapegoating.

In 2017, Act 1 was led by Ethereum and ICOs—ETH soared from $8 to $400 by June, fueled by token sales like Bancor and Tezos—while Bitcoin played second fiddle. Post-intermezzo, Act 2 saw Bitcoin rocket to $20,000 on retail FOMO, joined by BCH (peaking at $4,000) and EOS, an "Ethereum killer."

Act 1 was ETH and ICOs; Act 2 was dominated by Bitcoin.

In 2021, Act 1 featured Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DeFi bluechips like Aave and Uniswap, maturing into “institutional-grade” assets. Post-intermezzo, Act 2 shifted to LUNA’s meteoric rise, OlympusDAO’s (3,3) staking craze, and Solana’s $260 peak, with AVAX, DOT, and memecoins (DOGE, SHIB) riding the wave.

Act 1 belonged to BTC, ETH, and DeFi stalwarts; Act 2 to LUNA, Olympus forks, SOL, and a broader altcoin rally.

The Original Sin

This cycle’s foundational principle is institutional adoption, unlike the technological innovations of ICOs (2017) and DeFi (2021). It’s a top-down shift driven by ETF and MicroStrategy (MSTR) capital. Yet all cycles share a thread of financial engineering: 2017’s global capital coordination, 2020’s onchain yield, and 2024’s institutional access.

Although the memecoin quest might sidetrack an observer, it’s merely bait (just like NFTs were a cycle ago). A cycle within a bigger cycle. But it plays a key role in revealing a rejection of grand ambition: price becomes both the means and the end, a last-ditch effort to retire bloodlines before institutions seize full control and grift becomes the domain of white collars.

Institutions are here—not just a meme from 2017’s Enterprise Ethereum Alliance but a reality in 2024 with spot Bitcoin ETFs launching on January 11. Donald Trump’s election, vowing to make America a crypto superpower, marked a leap forward. By November 2024, crypto rode a wave of enthusiasm—Wall Street was in, a strategic reserve loomed, and a stablecoin bill hinted at a new form of dollarization.

But Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 brought anxiety. Expectations of divine government intervention faltered amid trade war FUD and macro turmoil. The community realized Trump, an S-tier influencer, had “rugged” the market with his own memecoin, abruptly ending the memecoin supercycle. Act 1 closes here, with the community grasping for institutions to save them—no scapegoat in sight.

No Bottom Before The Second Act

We’re in an intermezzo now, March 2025, with Bitcoin down from its highs and the broader altcoin market absolutely decimated. The reason the intermezzo unravels is because people truly believe it is over. The violence rages with the community in disarray but the scapegoat remains unrevealed.

History whispers that Act 2 often ignites a price frenzy, redirecting desire and delaying the sacrificial crisis. Yet this isn’t a promise of price surging wildly—it’s a question of whom we’ll blame when the excess of institutional adoption finally buckles.

The scapegoat must emerge from the institutions that birthed this cycle’s promise. Will it be a vague, collective cry—“institutions killed crypto”—pointing fingers at BlackRock’s ETF empire or the faceless suits who dollarized our rebellion?

Or will it crystallize into something sharper, something personal? Could MicroStrategy implode, its $40 billion Bitcoin bet unraveling in a spectacular leveraged collapse, leaving Michael Saylor as the ultimate degen king—once hailed as a visionary, now sacrificed for our sins? Perhaps Trump, the S-tier influencer who rugged us with his memecoin hype, joins the pyre.

This isn’t the bottom—not yet. The mimetic chaos churns, and Act 2 looms. Whether it brings a frenzied rally as it was the case in the past before falling into a deeper abyss is to be seen.

One thing is certain: the scapegoat is coming, and it might wear a suit. If he does not wear a suit he could be blamed for not owning one, yet forced to show up in French riviera during high season.

Who will we burn at the stake to symbolically close another chapter?

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The Pre-Growth Stage

I once thought crypto hadn’t faced its Dotcom bubble, but 2017-2025 proved it was exactly that.

The fact that the Dotcom era was about investing in the future and investing in technology and crypto is no longer seen as “future” nor valued as “tech” takes away its power to engage the masses. Crypto cemented its grift reputation among normies.

It is more likely we’re entering disillusionment in broader crypto markets. Bitcoin is on its own separate adoption cycle to the rest of crypto, which makes it harder to recognize it, but a quick long and short-term look at “alts” tell a clear story. (Important to note that everything is on the same macro cycle.)

Finally, tokens will go to zero, or at least, will be infinitely approaching zero. While we hope our tokens dodge the fall, we should embrace market maturation. And that is not a painless process.

Practically, this means isolated pockets of performance. Alts don’t exist as a category anymore (and cycles in traditional crypto sense either), dispersion of returns will continue and deepen. Narrative plays will get even shorter, on the other hand “value plays” will emerge. This will be a multi-year process.

VC is not dead. The best will stay and refine their skills and improve their understanding and foresight. Hopefully, they’ll be able to fund innovation and its subsequent deployment at scale.

The best opportunities today could perhaps be found in the public market. An investment opportunity in the future of technology is not a window of weeks or months. Capturing the value of some of the existing biggest tech companies was a multi-year or decade-long opportunity.

Everybody Does The Same Thing

As an early-stage crypto investor, hindsight shows that, on average, not investing from 2016-2020 left you poorer, while avoiding action from 2022-2025 left you richer. Paper gains do not count — much of the crypto venture gains from the earlier era were monetizable.

The crypto investment game has changed. Merely participating does not guarantee success. Some extrapolate this and claim “VC is dead”. But what they mean is that the playbook of private-to-public market arbitrage that produced high returns in the past has shrunk if not fully disappeared.

When everyone does the same thing it stops working. Such a playbook only works when few can do it. When everyone is a VC how can everyone make money? When retail joins low-barrier “VC-as-a-service” platforms, who’s left to buy?

It turns out that higher barriers of entry are what made money in the past. Now, in the “even-level” playing field one cannot merely rely on a standardized playbook. Access alone is not “alpha” anymore. When access is productized alpha is drowned in the oversupply of mediocre products.

Too Much Capital

Such oversupply leads to an illusion of actual capital demand. This is how everyone in crypto was incentivized to exaggerate, or to believe in the exaggerated version of the future, to soak up more capital (a similar thing happening in AI right now) while the prices surged into a closing gap of regulatory arbitrage.

The more exaggerated the future the less specific the vision. In absolute terms, crypto is a small market that is still mostly in search of its PMF beyond 24/7 online gambling, stablecoins and “digital gold”.

The innovation alone does not cost much. Capital is better leveraged in the actual deployment of innovation, not in the “0 to 1” stage but in the “1 to n” paradigm. Innovation is more about deploying experimental ideas while the latter stage is about leveraging resources to distribute the solution to a wider customer base.

Crypto would largely benefit from funding smaller scale product-oriented experiments but to accommodate big demand of multi-hundred million “early-stage” funds, the industry ended up funding low-hanging fruit of rather generic infrastructure. The optionality of technobabble seems safer than specific high-risk products.

The mathematics of VC returns is simple. If you run a 500M fund for your “seed stage” ticket to have a meaningful impact on performance should be in the 2.5M to 5M range. This means an implied valuation of 25 to 50M for a seed stage.

Funding a new L1 with an uncapped upside (achnoring to capitalization of successful predecessors) was a more comfortable investment strategy. Similarly, L2s and other infrastructure (e.g. data-availability) were just a convenient generalization of the same playbook.

Stagnation

Today it is clear that it takes more than a destruction of a stablecoin experiment, wiping out bad credit and exchange failure to fully resolve a bubble of bad incentives. Thus, it’s better to see 2020-2025 as one continuous cycle. The brief intermezzo of catastrophic 2022 did not have a lasting effect due to above mentioned excess capital relative to talent/ideas/products.

Too much capital and little incentive to innovate just resumed the exploitation of what was at hand. Additional inflows of top-down liquidity of ETFs and Microstrategy encouraged market participants to be more aggressive. Again, we lean on capital inflows over real cashflows.

However, VCs have to distribute capital back to their LPs who don’t view their investments as a decade-long commitment. In order to raise more capital, funds needed DPI and were chasing it aggressively in the post-election market euphoria. Still not enough to return their funds but enough to get a couple of drops back to their LPs.

This means it is hard to get 2021 or 2017-like mania going since the retail requires higher and higher thresholds to be responsive and participate at scale while funds were chasing DPIs to get the game going (while undermining that very game at the same time).

In the memecoin paradigm the VCs were replaced with “cabals” with capital flowing to fund lifestyles of TikTok influencers recycling memecoin playbooks with new coins until market exhaustion. The TRUMP memecoin launch drove the final nail into retail participation hopes. TRUMP revealed crypto as a grift and memecoin casino as a tool of capital extraction.

The implication is that mainstream view of crypto is as a casino or get-rich-quick scheme rather than actual investment in the future. Coinciding with changes in the macro environment, the final blow to hopes that tokens possess free will has been dealt.

Between The Clownworld And The Realworld

Sometimes it seems like our hope oscillates between being bailed out by tradfi or degens. These are two radically different memes. But both can simply be stripped down to “liquidity”. Neither of these exists as a real adoption user base.

Degens are not a user profile nor an actual user group. Degens is a cryptobuzzword for liquidity that is neither sticky nor does it aid in long-term adoption. On the contrary – it invites compromising on a product with potential to cater to a non-existent group of people at the expense of real users. This is counterproductive in a search for the actual PMF.

People have confused “speculation is a wedge” with “speculation is the edge”. It is not. Alas, a big portion of decks that I see target “degens” without understanding that this is an opportunistic capital, not a sticky adoption.

Tradfi describes different sets of actors that either don’t understand what crypto is or those who understand it all too well and are not here to buy anyone else’s bags. This group excels in making money for themselves and will look for ways to adopt crypto that benefits them, not y/our bags.

Indeed, actual tradfi adoption becomes a great signal for growth but it might not be the growth you expected or are invested in. Giving up our agency to tradfi could mean a capitulation on a specific version of the future that we want to build.

What To Make Of It

Crypto’s 2017-2025 arc mirrors the Dotcom bubble, now entering disillusionment, with maturing markets leading to isolated wins, dying alts, and emerging value plays over the years.

Excessive capital in crypto fueled exaggerated visions and generic infrastructure investments, rather than specific, innovative products, driven by the need to deploy large VC funds at high valuations. The 2020-2025 period is one extended cycle, propped up by excess capital and liquidity from ETFs, but lacking real cash flow or innovation, with VCs chasing DPI in a pre-euphoric market that never fully lands.

Crypto oscillates between relying on memes of tradfi or degen liquidity, neither of which drives real adoption—degens are transient capital, and tradfi may co-opt crypto for its own gain, not broader benefit. The price action masked the disillusionment for a while but a macro cooldown shows the true cards.

A perspective from the inside reveals that our industry looks fragile. The outside perspective sees it as just another macro asset that outperforms every other asset class in favorable conditions. That’s not nothing.

Similarly to no true price discovery happening on the upside, there is not necessarily a “truth” in the washout. The same way herd mentality played itself on the way up, it might already be unfolding on the way down.

Let’s take into the account the positives we can build on:

1. Protocols and apps more robust – DeFi keeps working as intended even under highly volatile conditions

2. Stablecoins proving PMF – Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge hints that stablecoins solve cross border currency settlement and regulatory clarity opens up adoption vectors. The stablecoin activity has decoupled from crypto cycles and trading volumes.

3. There are cashflows and internet finance is slowly percolating itself into relevance

4. Memecoins a primitive commerce use case for crypto (pay-to-get-rugged)

5. Crypto’s capital formation enables idiosyncratic token experiments (DeSci, DePin, robotics etc.)

Perhaps necessity will lend itself better to invention than excess has so far. But genuine curiosity is what we need the most. Curiosity chases vision, not price action. I think this will catalyze much of the growth in the future. Slowly but surely we’ll embrace a new chapter.

Thanks to Matt and Rap for useful feedback.

The launch of $TRUMP memecoin had me reflecting on the past cycle and I drew some, maybe premature, conclusions:

• liquidity in crypto lacks depth

• rotation accelerates

• price targets are the only thing people believe

• markets holding onto top-down interference from the government (liquidity, regulation etc.)

• bottom-up works mostly for memecoins but is short-lived

• grifts are understood as grifts prospectively thus less effective

• zero-sum turns negative sum as $TRUMP liquidity rush decreased total mkt cap of crypto

On a whim, I made an ironic comparison to the last cycle to capture the moment crypto experienced when the soon-to-be president of the USA dropped a memecoin.

Let Me Take You Back To 2021

These were the golden days. Cue Push It To The Limits. Portfolio managers were literally buying Lambos, we were riding the (3, 3) wave to infinity and buying reasonably sized houses, MEV searchers were making millions on a slow weekend, NFTs mints were impossible to get into, everybody wanted to be like Kyle & Su as the supercycle was confirmed.

I would say deep down we all knew it was going to end one day but I personally was postponing to admit the reckoning is closer rather than further. We ran our venture fund from $11M to $330M in 2 years by barely selling anything on the move up. The fund was mostly liquid yet we took only small profits. I did not think the top was in yet. The diagram I made back in late 2021 describes clearly what I got wrong.

I thought the institutions would come and buy BTC marking the cycle top. That only happened at the inception of the next cycle. “Institutions buying BTC” was the catalyst to bullish sentiment in late 2023. In this diagram I omitted NFTs that should be inserted somewhere between Solana and OHM, however, technically OHM’s (3, 3) mania was built on the same principle as NFTs and correlated in timing.

To go even further back in time, in September 2020, post-DeFi Summer mania, I believed new technology (Solana and Polkadot specifically) would actually enable DeFi at scale. I was biased as I was involved with HydraDX, today called Hydration, which was on its way to becoming a liquidity parachain (rollups on Polkadot).

Given that Polkadot emphasized technological purism, decentralization and economic overengineering (parachain auctions) while Solana emphasized performance and commercialization - a winner has transpired 4 years later.

Although I don’t think these are mutually exclusive, one is becoming a hallmark of onchain commercialization (memecoins) while the other is culturally irrelevant (but good tech bro, congrats). Today SOL is miles ahead eyeing up dethroning ETH. Yet every time certain investors tout flippening — it marks its top. Nevertheless, the liquidity effects prevail in ecosystems favoring scalability.

In the end, the internal DeFi hype did not materialize into DeFi enlightenment. What followed starting in 2023 was peak degeneracy from a financial perspective but a goldmine from the commercialization or entertainment perspective. I am unsure about whether the current state of memecoins is net value creative or value extractive but my best comparison is celebrities or influencers launching their own commercial products.

The last cycle ended suddenly as worsening macro led to the unravelling of toxic credit flows inside of crypto. The destruction of DeFi yields and the first crypto too big to fail crash of LUNA led to liquidity evaporating. At the end of 2022, we learned who was swimming naked as the biggest scam in crypto transpired. FTX was the final reset.

Regulatory inquisition made the outlook very bleak. DeFi becoming a legitimate tool of financial institutions was impossible. More sinister or degen ways of manifesting the technological innovation of DeFi transpired — memecoins. This has been the first instance of crypto-native commerce.

Web3 as an idea has died. It was shown to be an overengineered trying-to-fit-a-square-peg-in- a-round-hole approach. “Twitter but onchain” and any attempt at social media was buried by the interest in the simple memecoin casino. Building what people ought to use instead of what they actually want turned out to be a bad way to attract users.

Also building on the idea that people migrate from Web2 to this abstract idea of Web3 was false. Proliferation of AI just solidified what crypto thought of as Web2. What remained was the “join if you can’t beat them” approach.

New Beginnings Or Closing The Chapter

The last cycle started with a clear innovation trigger of DeFi and ended for the obvious reasons mentioned above. This cycle began with a top-down inflow of ETFs that indirectly led to animal spirits chasing high returns mostly in memecoins.

In mid 2023 many investors expressed the desire to invest in the Solana of the next cycle unbeknownst to the fact that Solana itself was the Solana of the next cycle. The fact that it enabled the best playing field for liquidity-enthused traders made it win again. I view memecoins as a hybrid of OHM’s (3, 3) and NFTs, the yield is abstracted away, but the same ponzinomics applies while striving to become a cultural artifact.

Midway through 2024 crypto pegged itself to the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Again, clinging to a favorable top-down intervention, crypto half-admits it is out of innovation. Some blame regulatory uncertainty but I do not think innovation requires any kind of certainty. One can argue that it prohibits the previous innovation trigger (DeFi) from fully playing out.

Before the Trump election rally, we had a moment of some promising novelty. Agents and DeSci come to mind (bags!). Yet I don’t think that either is complete in its current iteration, these were very promising design spaces for innovation. Lots of bottom-up onchain activity led me to briefly think of GOAT as the YFI moment of this cycle.

The general market rally post-November 5 has pushed the prices in these novel categories higher and it also seemed to attract memecoin trader liquidity. However, the short-termism and general insecurity of investors and traders make any lasting trend impossible. The optionality of narratives incentivizes rotation as no one is forced to commit to anything.

For those hoping that retail will come back en masse – retail does not like volatility, they require a consistent price action. If we’re going to have wild swings we’ll be seen largely as grifters. Retail did not join in the Dotcom bubble because it was a grift but because it was seen as a technological revolution.

At An Impasse?

Through the Girardian lens, we might be entering a crisis as “a clear view of the inner workings indicates a crisis in the system; it is a sign of disintegration.”

$TRUMP seemed to have provided a fleeting moment of retail interest as Moonshot onboarded 400k users in a span of 24 hours. Also, a brief look at Google trends shows interest sparking. However, the grift was revealed as a grift, fortunately, or unfortunately, before a real retail mania could have started.

This leaves us hanging. Some are waiting for the next leg up while some are bracing for a bear market. One thing is certain – everyone watches the administration’s next move. In a span of days or weeks, we might get the answer to whether the ETFs and regulatory clarity are just a final leg to the unfinished business of the last cycle or actually a new beginning.

From a VC perspective, this cycle lacks a pure technological innovation trigger and rests on a regulatory trigger thus making it seem like an extension of the previous bull market rather than a bull market of its own.

One can say it’s semantics but I think the difference in outcome might not be subtle. If we’re closing the chapter we might enter a disillusionment. If it's an opening chapter we could enter a Dotcom bubble-like equivalent. What price-action we would actually need for people to stop top-calling every other day? – A bull market of massive proportion.

But a Girardian reading of the situation would suggest that bifurcation is a sign of the mania coming to an abrupt end:

“A clear-eyed view of the bubble cycle—an enterprise that starts out fabulously overhyped, and gradually grows into the hype—would lead to collapse, so participants rely on self-reinforcing collective delusions to maintain their esprit.”

Understanding the existing bifurcation as insiders vs insiders rather than insiders vs outsiders might suggest that this is not yet a broader hype. But can we get there with insiders derisking significantly because they got burned diamond-handing in the past cycle? Do outsiders even care any more to call us out?

The key insight lies in recognizing if the past months have been only an insider hype preceding a broader hype ahead of us or not – crypto is a skem and we need years to actually deploy technological innovation.

It is possible that we’re still heading into crypto's dotcom bubble. However, that is a function of liquidity rather than innovation. It is a question of what price would convince the retail to join the mania en masse and if fresh institutional inflow can send it there.

That threshold is high.

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Thanks to Matt, Shaun and Rap for their feedback.

Prediction markets are related to exogenous events and tend to resolve. Memecoins are purely endogenous thus e.g. MAGA coin has a life of itself that could be loosely related to real-world success of MAGA, as Donald Trump being elected president, but not necessarily.

What it truly captures is current mindshare, the level of attention MAGA coin gets. Most importantly, it is a financialized mindshare or an onchain mindshare.

It is also a form of attention manipulation but instead of a clickbait – financial means are employed. Pumping a token to capture attention is a bet, perhaps a deceptive strategy, but anything goes in a war for mindshare.

Memecoins are the financialized equivalent of a social media post. Memecoins bundle distribution (advertisement) and a product into one. Memecoins is the new media.

Social media are attention networks that have grown asocial in recent years. It’s less about extracting dopamine through connecting to other people and more about extracting dopamine at any cost. Social graphs are much harder to farm for dopamine (and capital) than generic entertainment of up and down price movement.

The underlying unit of attention networks is social capital—the power of one’s reach. Social capital can be transformed into financial capital, as with a large audience, one can monetize the following.

The underlying unit of attention markets is financial capital - how much money is or could be made. It starts and ends with money. One can use attention networks to identify attention markets but the price is the news has never been more true than with memecoins.

This hyperfinancialization of attention is the purest form of monetization online. There is no need for an intermediary product such as an online course, white-labeled coffee mugs and other junk. There is also no social influence needed to monetize. One can attract others to a memecoin purely with financial capital.

It does help if one can shill a coin to a social network but numbers matter less. Capital is what matters as attention follows capital. In a sense, it is the purest form of social media. It’s purely and openly transactional.

As Taleb wrote “money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like "recognition" and "credit" warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry”.

Memecoins are the fastest and digitally-native way to extract capital from attention. The value flows where attention goes. Indeed, attention is ephemeral. So is the value attached to it. Hence to monetize one usually has to make a profit earlier rather than later. Few memes have staying power. Rugs are a feature, not a bug.

There is no need to overcomplicate memecoins by attaching the label of nihilism. Memecoins are fundamentally indefinitely optimistic. It is a novel form of entertainment and the first onchain (a)social product-market fit.

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Two phenomena seem to reign supreme over the world in this day and age.

1. Elon’s Razor of the most entertaining outcome is the most probable

2. What used to be entertainment is serious and what was serious is entertainment

Number 1 is pretty easy to document. Just the fact that Elon Musk runs a US department called DOGE is unfathomable by the 2016 standards. That was only 8 years ago.

Number 2 is a manifestation of number 1. The US election was a true season finale to a reality show called “The America”. Politics becomes entertainment. War casualties being streamed. The jokes being canceled. Movie plots used to convey an agenda. Social media posts getting prosecuted.

One niche symptom of “what was serious turning into entertainment” is money. Memecoin to be precise. Magic internet money as they call it. Funnymoney. The 24/7 online lottery of memes.

While apparently, the sovereigns will acquire BTC reserves en masse (following a bunch of innovators like El Salvador and Bhutan) only to give a big middle finger to Germany who rushed to sell in August. In retrospect, it’s obvious that one should not expect an economically rational decision from a country that decided to continue shutting down its nuclear energy power plants while on a proxy war path with its former biggest energy supplier.

Meanwhile, Michael Saylor is working on the mother of all bubbles, allowing Wall Street to beat sovereigns to the race.

But this is all Financial Times-type news that the reader does not really care about. What’s happening below? What has been brewing underneath for a while and can move the wheels of the apparent bull market?

If you don’t know who the user is - YOU are the user

For the insiders, crypto has become a lifestyle. Terrible thing to admit but it’s true. It is a lifestyle that is an aggregate of consuming premium goods from various crypto brands. It's a lifestyle based on moving money, losing money and hoping to retire with no effort. Mable put it much less cynically:

“It’s a lifestyle where only the “current” and “now” matter because the influence of anyone or anything is reflected almost in real-time in what we’re experiencing. The concept of an end result is nearly obsolete, as the world has truly become an infinite game.”

Crypto has gotten faster with “seasons” turning into weeks. Altcoin season is now a week of price performance for a specific niche of altcoins. Narrative rotation is faster than ever. So many distractions to choose from. 

Crypto has truly arrived in Kevin Kelly’s protopia; “the problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problem will cause the problem of tomorrow.”

Crypto is in the never-ending state of becoming. Incremental improvements are not visible for a long time and all it takes is a little nudge, little liquidity and an expectation of a political tailwind, to make the aggregate of the incremental transform into a financial frenzy.

Everything in crypto is charged by money. It is money. It is the hyperfinancialization of attention. 

Everyone is a user even if they do not know it. The thing about living in protopia, in the state of becoming, is that you don’t even realize you live it because you’re forced to upgrade everyday. 

Everyday you’re a newbie even if you don’t think of yourself as such:

“The momentum of technologies pushes us to chase the newest, which are always disappearing beneath the advent of the next newer thing, so satisfaction continues from our grasp”

In 2017 onchain trading via orderbooks (shoutout to Ethredelta) was an inferior experience and AMMs were deemed inefficient. In 2018 the problem was that no one wanted tokens. In 2020 the market realized that they can make money swapping tokens permissionlessly on Uniswap and provision liquidity while getting paid.

Ok, but gib ticker

What I know is that every time it’s different but it also is not. The difference lies in the nuance of every frenzy surpassing the imagination and expectations of most. There is no way to predict which way it will take us, especially with so many ecosystems and applications brewing in all directions.

My best guess is that rotation gets faster, certain waves return a couple of times, and path independence will be the most precious resource to navigate such an environment. The ecosystem (L1/2s) becomes less important as trends become app/use-case dominant.

The “agent” and “DeSci” themes are the most interesting to me because they play into existing industries of DeFi and memecoins. The synergic momentum could lead to a Cambrian explosion of new use cases - some more flashy and hopefully others making a real difference.

If the value can freely flow between DeFi, DeSci and agents, we could actually productize “investment in progress” and wrap it in memes. It then becomes self-reinforcing and expands crypto markets into unforeseen places. 

We need crypto to promote positive sum games by creating new markets. This might be why big players in the industry explore these themes that can have real-world impact real fast. Memecoins becoming RWAs were no one's bingo card.

As in every mania, the demand for genius ideas will produce a steady supply of imposters, gimmicks and scams.

What calls itself a cult is not a cult

Innovation triggers might be visible only in retrospect as in protopia aggregation of incremental progress becomes visible in short bursts. What follows is validation turning people blind and hunger leads to entitlement. Entitlement grows into megalomania.

Bitcoin used to be the gateway drug to crypto. Not anymore. Not for retail at least. Memecoins are a monetized attention market and are becoming the access point for new users. But what they are is a momentum trade. They cannot be forward-looking.

It’s a shock value replaced by a new shock value. No insight can predict that. These are as fast as any social media posts. They are the new media. Memcoins redefine what a social media post can be.

Just recently people realized one can attach memecoins to a vision and give it an actual persona. GOAT’s loose affiliation with The Terminal Of Truth was the first instance of memecoin tied to the persona of an AI agent. LUNA followed. Albeit rather generic in their expression it indicates there is a design space to experiment in.

Couple days ago I was surprised by a memecoin tied to an agent that takes control of robots globally, driving and streaming (Disclaimer: Frodobots is our portfolio company and we bought SAM). If people continue iterating at this rate, the game remains entertaining. This only confirms that this is the peak cryptotainment era. (Meme)coins are media that people consume.

At the moment, the agentic element is mostly a generic surface-level dressing up. It is also an automation of shilling. But it offers novelty and expands imagination. It forces some level of innovation other than promises of “cult”.

Some use phrases like “religious following” and “cult” very lightly. There is but one cult in crypto and that’s the belief in up only. Oddly it is a religion of maximizing rational economic choice while making irrational financial decisions. But real cults never call themselves cults.

So what you might have missed, whether you were here or not, is that crypto is actually becoming a consumer product. It created a new medium to be consumed in a short-attention-span dopamine farming era with its value somewhat ephemeral. All this while riding economic and political tailwinds.

The most entertaining outcomes will go both ways. Fortunes will be lost in seconds. The biggest opportunities always lie in the asymmetric outcomes. The most promising things today did not look like opportunities yesterday. The biggest threats are readily ignored.

Opportunism is the strongest cult in crypto.

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Humans have a great propensity to worship things. Religions and ideologies provide almost as much social cohesion as written and enforced legislation of a government-backed by a monopoly on violence. For that matter, these religions and ideologies are often nested in a monopoly on violence as well.

But oftentimes, people choose to believe things without being forced. They chose their deity based on appeal. In recent years a new religion formed around AI. People claim bitcoin and crypto are a religion, but so is Artificial Intelligence.

I would argue that the idea of AGI is nothing more but a second reincarnation of Abrahamic God. First was the nation-state. The second is a chatbot. It doesn't really matter if we get to AGI (fyi I don’t think we’re anywhere close). What matters is if people believe it.

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” – (Hebrews 11:1)

God truly is almighty because whether he exists or not he commands so much power in the minds of his subjects. Now imagine, even if the AI is not AGI or superintelligent (whatever that means) what matters is if it can make people do what it wants. And what it wants is just a projection of the people. God only speaks to us through prophets and signs but not directly. It’s for us to interpret.

So even if these chatbot AIs are dumber than humans, they are outsmarting many. They are a case of Artificial Outelligence that I mentioned over 4 years ago in the first-ever substack post:

“An unintelligent computer system that evolves by hijacking the minds it dupes & outwits. Outelligence is a form of an unintelligent life outwitting an intelligent life.”

Terminal Of Truths is a prime example of hijacked minds by a piece of code that makes the minds do things. And one of the things is buying a cryptocurrency that is loosely affiliated with this chatbot — GOAT aka Goatseus Maximus. People want to believe things so much that they already pumped the coin to 900 million market cap at some point.

This Golden Calf, or actually a Golden Goat, becomes a schelling point for those who want to believe and those more opportunistic. Everyone is incentivized to exaggerate. Abrahamic God killed most pagan Gods. 

There became only one God. Granted a few forks (interpretations) along the way. 

But only one source.

GOAT has potentially catalyzed a new era of crypto meeting AI in the decentralized autonomous agentic economy. Both the AI and crypto crowd will potentially milk this narrative to avoid stagnation in their respective fields. 

Agents become angels without agency that will promise things to believers. The question is how autonomous these agents can truly get. Luffistotle goes as far as calling this “the immaculate conception of a crypto KOL”. Ultimately this is not a form of AI but a form of aforementioned Artificial Outelligence – a “dumb” algo that modifies our behavior through our own desires and projections.

Perhaps one day we’ll be looking back at this moment as entering a peak cryptotainment era. Perhaps this is a start of new faith beyond riding the price high. The question is how long will people simp for generic interaction with bots and how fast builders can iterate.

Is this the YFI or LOOT moment? Is this a true Schelling point or is it just part of the rotation? — We’ll have to let the game run for a little while to find out. A lot of buzzwords and narratives to chase with a liquidity tailwind.

That is not to say one cannot stumble upon information that turns out to be useful investment advice. That happens on CNBC too. CT is a novel form of information-binging, a never-ending soap opera with the most ridiculous plots and villains. It’s mostly entertainment. And there’s nothing wrong with that. 

This episode made me ponder on the state of crypto. At some point it hit me - crypto is mainstream. It might not be mainstream adoption but it is mainstream entertainment. How many people around you have not heard of crypto? Today it’s actually a topic of the US presidential election. How can it not be mainstream?

People like to be early and they like to fool themselves into thinking that being early is good enough to make money. Participation is a guarantee of success. And CT is a false prophet perpetuating this. Alpha this and alpha that…CT is a reality show selling tokens as entertainment and I don’t care how big your discretionary capital pool is.

CT is neither bad nor good for the industry, it is just a manifestation of a larger trend to which crypto pivoted. From the humble anarcho-capitalist to peak aspiration culture, crypto today is undergoing tiktokization and packaged to consumers in a way Satoshi could’ve not imagined.

Just one last grift…I promise

A CT classic once wrote on twitter (something like this): “Signs of froth are indistinguishable from mainstream adoption.” The problem with being mainstream is that you can’t rely on being early. Participation does not guarantee generational wealth.

Crypto has adopted its own version of manifest destiny culture. Whether you’re a bitcoin, ETH, or SOL maxi you might believe the legend of the four-year cycle. Almost all hesitantly believe that we are preordained to grow, every four years a big bull appears out of nowhere and leads us to the land of plenty.

But as the industry grew bigger and branched into a fractal-like network, imitation and exploitation have become more rewarding than innovation. The industry now relies on the mantra of a four-year cycle perpetuating an idea of being early as a skill. This could be changing, and participating might not be enough. The consequences of complacency will catch up with us eventually.

Necessity is a mother of invention but unfortunately, there has been an abundance of capital that optimizes for short-term games (of marking up) and a healthy supply of savvy founders who know how to play the VC Keynesian beauty contest. There has been no necessity and no real innovation trigger in the past two years.

That is why currently crypto only looks at macro interference as a saving grace, either rate cuts or the new presidential administration. This suggests we are expecting to benefit from a top-down inflow of capital (e.g. ETFs) rather than bottom-up innovation. The question is if the game breaks sooner or later.

VCs in general are struggling to raise new funds and the industry of VC is scrutinized over the lack of distributions. Crypto is the same but with the caveat of existing crypto LPs having been pampered with distributions around 2021. It’s not going to happen this time around as funds touting paper gains soon met the ruthlessness of the paper hand.

The only savior is the divine intervention of the golden bull. Betting on financial perversion as the only way out and hoping for greater fools to bail us out show how far we have fallen. The thing is most don’t even hide it. I have never stood on the edge of the bullmarket in which everyone could not wait to sell.

The idea of crypto "cycles" needs to be destroyed altogether for crypto to truly cross the chasm into something entirely new. As long as the idea of the "four-year cycle" exists, the default incentives will be to 

1. prioritize short-term behavior (both as builders and investors) and 

2. perpetuate the greater fool theory because there will always be the belief that the current cycle will eventually collapse.

Crypto is turning into a zero-sum game as low-hanging fruit ideas have been picked. Founders and “communities” celebrate big fundraises without any product as a win. Xs of Ys (Aave/Uniswap/pump.fun but on this chain) get funded left and right masking the fact that there is no true technological innovation like we had in the past cycle (DeFi). There are no things on their own here.

What do we still believe other than a fool’s hope of our bags being redeemed? Do we believe The Big CT, which is but a sentiment amplifier? Do we believe in alpha or do we believe in fooling ourselves into narratives?

See, this is what we’re left with…narratives. We are brute-forcing stories we don’t believe in, only hoping someone else will. - But you can’t have bull markets and adoption without narratives! - No you can’t, but the narratives work best when you don’t think of them as narratives.

Real narratives are not manufactured on Twitter. They are forged by the innovation which then inspires enthusiasm turning into extrapolated hubris. This is how manias work. There must be a substance on which they are founded. We don’t have that substance. We only have a desire to propagate processes - exploit memes and tweet empty narratives into existence.

I’ve been guilty of this myself. Obfuscating a lack of product by yelling CULTURE! is not good enough anymore. The only culture we have been fostering is the culture of exploiting vapid narratives and brute-forced communities that are only as strong as the price action.

But maybe, after all, we should not underestimate the predictability of stupidity. Hasn’t this always saved us from impending doom before? Or maybe tucked away in a corner a big innovation is brewing? 

I don’t have the answers. I suspect that without markets reaching new highs we’ll enter an unforeseen territory, which might be painful in short to mid-term but good for innovation in crypto.

Thanks to Matt, Rap and Cam for feedback.

Crypto Twitter ("CT") is a beast like no other. And my relationship with it has evolved over the years as I have come to understand the way that it moves, and perhaps more importantly, how it has compelled me to move with it.

To understand what something is, rather than what someone wants it to be, is the only way to truly live. And in the case of CT, to understand what it is, is to understand a core piece of The Game, which is the only way to truly play.

What is it?

Crypto Twitter is like a Rorschach; it morphs into what you seek. To a degenerate, it appears as a casino, showering one with memes and various forms of shitposting. To a novice, it appears like alpha, exposing one to seemingly well-intentioned individuals who share trade ideas. To a more seasoned individual, it can appear nuanced, filled with seemingly thorough and systematic investment theses from competent market participants and reputable venture capitalists. 

But make no mistake, these beliefs are all misguided, which is in fact the Rorschach's greatest act. For if one were to remove CT's Rorschach mask, they would be met with a schizophrenic cesspool of (sometimes) innocent market commentary and (most times) egregious investment endorsement; culminating into a useless, and in fact detrimental, barrage of noise that makes signal virtually an impossibility.

Why is it useless?

1 | No One Knows Anything

What is the evidence that anyone on CT knows anything? Sure, they may have attained success in past cycles. But there are always going to be people that attain success in a bull market. This is John the high-yield trader from Fooled by Randomness. This is the person who, by luck, attained a level of success but at the same time is on the precipice of financial ruin. 

Well, what about people who have raised large venture funds? One may think they must surely know something. But why is raising a venture fund something to hold in high regard? How is one able to raise a venture fund? In many instances, they achieved success in the past and there is expectation by investors they can do it again. We just went over that this character, in many instances, is nothing other than lucky. 

I must emphasize that I am not advocating for the idea that all investment success is luck, I am simply saying that all investment success is a combination of luck and skill, and it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the two (I will not belabor this point for Nassim Taleb has already written an entire masterpiece on it in FBR).

2 | There is No Alpha

Putting aside whether any one individual is skilled or lucky, is it possible to find alpha on twitter? By definition, alpha is excess return relative to a benchmark. For this to be achieved, one must know something about the future before it occurs and before others also believe it to occur. Something found on CT is then definitionally not alpha. For by the time you see it on your timeline you are so far along the informational centipede that you are taking on significant risk for minimal reward. All alpha that is uttered out loud turns into beta.

3 | Exposure to the Lemmings

Even if there was a modicum of value to be found, the timeline is filled with such rapid swings in mood that maintaining one's own conviction becomes impossibly difficult. One day everyone is euphoric, the next they are filled with despair. Even if you intellectually know this, you cannot help but to be influenced by the lemming-style mood of the timeline which is spoken with absolute conviction. The inevitable result being a transformation into a lemming yourself.

What now?

If one's true desire were investment success, and they truly understood they were exposing themselves to a schizophrenic cesspool with zero alpha, they would not need to be told to avoid such a place. Similar to someone not having to be told to avoid jumping in front of a car. But despite it being an intellectually easy concept to understand, it is still a loaded statement and not as simple as one may think.

An understanding of the outcome of exposure to CT is not very difficult to intellectually understand. The more difficult (and necessary) question one must ask is, what does the individual truly want. What is their true desire.

If the inevitable result of using this forum is inferior returns, why would someone who desires investment success continue to use it? The answer to this question is that this individual does not in fact seek superior investment returns, despite the belief that they do. This is not what they truly desire. Their actions clearly show this.

If this is the case, the question then becomes, "How could one desire inferior returns?"

It is not so much that one desires inferior returns in their isolated state, but rather they desire something else to a greater degree. Some desire to be right. Some desire entertainment. Some desire community. Some desire to be part of the consensus. Some desire a stroking of their ego. Some desire validation for their outrage. Some desire the luxury of self-pity. While the desire may differ across participants, the fact remains that superior returns is not their greatest desire. And the greatest desire always wins.

But there is one more reason why CT remains so popular. It is something so tantalizing that it is virtually impossible to escape its grip. And that is the idea that one just hasn't found the correct take *yet*. The idea that, yes, while none of it has worked *so far*, I will find something in the future that does. And this is how humans waste their entire lives, CT-related and otherwise.

Seeking inferior returns is not wrong, just as seeking superior returns is not right. Self-judgment is a deadend. Should's and should not's lead nowhere. Simply, one may be interested in looking deeper into their desires. Not because they should, but because they have recognized that the inevitable result of their current desires has been failure. And that no matter how many boxes they open or tweets they consume, the outcome can only ever be failure. To many this will be satisfactory, but to others this will be unacceptable. And it is this unacceptability that will propel them to embark upon a journey that allows them to reach an understanding of where world class investment returns truly live. And where they do not.

Thanks @mattigags and @long_solitude for helping me think deeper about the piece.

And as it happens, the biggest enemies are not the heretics - the nocoiners, but those who dare to bastardize my scripture. Bitcoincers hate Ethereum folks, ETH folks don’t like the Solana crowd. I’m exaggerating for a good reason. Good to keep in mind that it’s usually the intolerant minority that is the most vocal. But the conflict is obvious - it’s not the coin vs nocoin, it is one coin against the other.

Talking about conflicts does not sound optimistic but it just shows how this subculture copies religious conflicts of the past (and the present). If crypto is a religion it is the one that is centered around monetary, financial and commercial revolution. The gods are fungible, narratives flexible and financial expectations expandable. Crypto replaces the “in God we trust” with “in our Coin we trust”.

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Optimism

The optimism I’m alluding to is about an individual who understands his or her ability to transform the world as a superpower and embraces this to harness energy from the brutish nature that he was born into.

The optimist is prone to experimenting and takes risks on his behalf. The optimist loves liberty and despises tyranny. But when the optimist despises something he does so with a skin in the game. He takes the opposing bet because he knows that, as Celine wrote; “when men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.”

The optimist does not feel the urge to govern on behalf of others, he understands he is often wrong but tries nonetheless. The optimist takes his chance to explore, create and rebuild the world to his image. The optimist understands that ever-expanding knowledge is the string of life, enabling his offspring to scrape the old and follow new ideas.

The optimist understands that resources are not the limit but the opportunity as the ideas give power to resources, harnessing the surroundings into energy that serves him. The optimist embraces change and sees it as imperative to moving forward.

How does this optimism connect to the crypto pitch? The fact that at the beginning of this all was a man who was able to envision a world in which governments do not control monetary matters as a better world is the deeply optimistic origin of crypto. 

Not because governments are evil but because they are susceptible to corruption. And that’s not because people are evil either. Institutions are prone to power grabs the longer they govern their community. After a while, they start to look inward and serve primarily to themselves. Why? 

Because as they age they become less relevant with their dogma being static and the world moving forward. But they want to survive. They cling to relevance. Suddenly, the world serves them and they do not serve the world anymore. And to survive they need to exert more power at the cost of the community they govern.

The original crypto idea – bitcoin, was about exerting less power, relying not on a monopoly on violence but an immutable code in the cloud. Foolish dream. Yet it worked. The optimistic experiment is now worth trillions of dollars. Today it’s not only bitcoin. It’s much more.

Cryptos

The ups and downs in crypto are very apparent. The higher the high the more painful the comedown. Some rules of nature apply to financial markets as well. And human spirit too. There’s always something happening as crypto never sleeps.

The shills and the critics can’t agree if memecoins are good or evil, with some succumbing to the price action. They also can’t reconcile if the VC-funded coins that drop on the market at insane valuations are going down before or after they release an MVP.

Investors hop from narrative to narrative, funding things that either won’t work or can’t work or no one will ever use if they do work. Most things will go to zero. F***ing zero. And that’s fine. - “Wait what? I came here for the optimistic crypto pitch.”

Medium is the message. Memecoins are a medium, crypto is a medium, and human behaviour just plays out in a new way as the novel technology enables it. And things going to zero is a part of that game.

It is fine that things go to zero because crypto is still the most optimistic technology movement in the world. Every technological and cultural revolution enables exploitation exactly because it’s revolutionary. This opens up the information asymmetry that people are quick to (mis)use to their advantage.

But at the end of the day, in crypto, people are taking matters into their hands, trying to solve governance problems (woefully failing), trying to build new internet, credibly neutral payment rails, new physical infrastructure for various funky use cases, fund research project that don’t get funded elsewhere, hustling with culture monetization, attaining generational wealth before releasing a product adopted by more than 1000 users, building casinos that become alternative financial products, attempting to build new cities and defy death. Most of this is misguided perhaps. But it shows the great spirit crypto offers. 

Crypto is Wild West meets Las Vegas, it is the frontier where you can become rich overnight but you’re more likely to lose your net worth getting scammed by a sex worker. It is a place where dreams come true, land is to be claimed, wealth is gambled away and conflicts are daily.

The Pessimists And The Optimists

For years I have carried Peter Thiel’s simplified 2x2 optimism versus pessimism framework in my mind. When you have a hammer everything… Thiel makes a distinction between definite and indefinite forms of both pessimism and optimism. 

He writes: “If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it...if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.”

Indefinite pessimists “just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse...the indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen”. 

Definite pessimists are “obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse...believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it”. 

An indefinite optimist sees a better future but he doesn’t know how to get there. And finally, a definite optimist, sees an improved future so he plans and works to make it so. So this is my simplified version of applied to narratives that dominate my Twitter feed:

I frame politics vs tech as a vertical dividing line between definite and indefinite. This is because politics is not about wealth creation but about governing and distribution. At best, good politics is an enabler of technology and entrepreneurship. But on its own - it does not create the future. Technology does. It is a substrate on which society unfolds and a network facilitating the exchange of information between humans.

The horizontal dividing line is about the role of an individual versus the role of the collective. The optimists emphasize the above-mentioned individual who becomes the foundation. It is more about the bottom-up emergence of change and robustness through decentralization. Whereas the pessimists see the world as fragile and want to rely on top-down enforcement of control. Only they can fix things (through power) so things don’t get worse.

Let’s start with the definite pessimism of the AI narrative. It’s definite because it relies on a technological paradigm. Why pessimism? At the centre of this narrative is the machine as something greater than the human itself. It's a novel interpretation of God that speaks to mortals through a chatbot. The centralized algo to rule them all. And we’re at the mercy of this technology. 

It’s either certain death by this superior being or maybe we can work on the alignment scripture. AI as “Abrahamic interpretation” rather than artificial intelligence. A human becomes a mere subject. There’s nothing we can do, we can’t stop it only to yield and hope we don’t get annihilated by this ferocious force. 

The other pessimists, the indefinite ones, are the woke. The ones who think everything has been invented and now we can only redistribute. At the centre of this interpretation is power. Leverage power to distribute from powerful to powerless. There’s nothing else that can be done, capitalism has failed and we can only freeze humanity, govern with the cold hand of bureaucracy that forces us into the misery of paper straws.

The human is the culprit. Nature is the victim. The poor are the victims. The winners are the perpetrators. The only way is if we all lose equally. There’s nothing left just to promote surface diversity and idea homogeneity, done so by the people to whom the rules don’t exactly apply because they are here to deliver us from the original sin. The world is finished, stop using the energy for progress because the only progress is the equality of misery.

Now moving on to the indefinite optimists of “hey, things have not worked out this way, so we should go back and fix things.” But how? Going backwards is not the way. The path forward is unknown. Embracing nationalism? Sure, it works for cultural cohesion, but the scale transformation property of patriotic individuals could translate into an annihilation machine.

Indefinite optimism refuses the homogeneity of globalism and nonsensical bureautic overload but is confused about the transformation of new technological realities. It feels threatened and could be prone to close-mindedness. It does not know how to embrace the technology that is the substrate on which society functions. 

Ban social media? Is it the same as banning the printing press? The Reformation has started and stifling it will ultimately backfire. How to take matters into one’s hands to work towards a specific version of the future?

The Definite Optimism Of Crypto

If you have been around crypto for a while you know it’s a mess. Absolute mess. But the chaos, the hustle, and the energy of misguided technorevolution are the result of a strong desire to take matters into one's own hands. 

It starts with finance because the market is the resource-controlling machinery. If we change the structure we can divert the flow of value into things boomers would not dare. They like things how they are. Crypto does not. It wants change but does not rely on mere protesting. It builds. It takes risks. It does not want to occupy the Wall St. It wants to free it.

Crypto is solarpunk. Crypto is about financial freedom, decentralized cities, and funding scientific experiments. Crypto is the disobedient naughty child. Albeit naive on the surface, the decentralized and credible neutral money free of corruption and political bias is a substantial technological revolution. It liberalizes funding. It ignores the politics of alarmism. Did the world get safer with the tyranny of KYC and AML or did the inverse happen?

Crypto creates a new asset class that enables wealth transfer from the incumbent generation. Housing is unaffordable, so crypto creates new games to get around the bureaucratic machinery preventing young people from owning anything and getting ahead in life. It refuses to “own nothing and be happy”. It wants to own everything and be miserable. But be miserable on its own terms.

Yes, we launch valueless NFTs. Yes, we drop overvalued tokens on clueless retail. Yes, we technobabble to save our lives. Yes, we fund utterly useless things. Ultimately, this is the revolution. No one promised you it was going to be nice.

We claimed the digital world, created new rules and started new games. It’s not perfect but we’re on a mission. Embracing the individual and finding novel means to do finance and commerce. These might be quirky experiments but there is a vision that understands money is the capacity for change. 

We move slowly, one success at a time. Bitcoin. Ethereum. ICOs. Uniswap. Solana. What’s next? Bio.xyz? HairDAO? Most will fail on the frontier. But it’s the very few that will survive that will make a global impact. We are embracing the asymmetry of the outcome.

And yes, crypto is the true frontier. You don’t need a list of credentials to make a dent in this world. A few lines of code can go a long way. Terrible ideas are launched to the moon (and back). But the good ideas too. And we need more of those.

So if you’re not in crypto then you should come and join the clowns, scammers and pilgrims. There’s a lot of money to be made and fortunes to lose. We fund truly miserable endeavours. 

We always need new people to help us move through a sticking point. We can’t rely on divine intervention to move forward because we become indefinite optimists. We need new ideas and bold execution to remain the most definite optimist movement on this planet.

It will not be the boomers buying bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs. It will be the nocoiner normies who venture into the frontier, find inspiration and build against all odds. That’s the spirit driving crypto forward.

This is a spiritual sequel to “Why I’m Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Crypto” and “Casino On Mars”. You should read those too if I have not convinced you that crypto is a fruitful endeavour.

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Tired of hearing about the new hot infrastructure that’s getting funded left and right? Is crypto’s technological friction a true barrier to mainstream adoption? Or do we just postpone answering the truly hard questions?

I saw a video where the founder of Shopify was saying those VCs who missed out on funding his company claimed the TAM at the time was too small. At the time they counted around 50k online stores. Today Shopify alone counts 1M merchants. 

Shopify’s solution created a new market by solving the technological friction of creating online stores. So the question for the onchain economy is: do we need more use cases to attract users or do we need better tech? Or do we need more use cases to attract users? Or is speculating on tech the use case?

Currently, more builders are building for other builders than builders building for actual users. It’s easier to optimize for a VC pitch. The more obscure your product, the more reflexive the token. At the moment we have more tech than use cases. 

To reiterate the above (at least) one of these must be true:

1. We need better tech first to get rid of the user friction

2. Tech is irrelevant, build for users first and then build infra (see Amazon/AWS)

3. The tech is the product and VCs are the consumers and sponsors of the casino

Extrapolating Shopify’s success story to today’s state of onchain usage we could assume that the lack of useful applications can be attributed to technological friction. Shopify created the new market so there was no actual TAM before.

If that is correct I posit we need to abstract the complexity away rather than add infra. The answer seems to be less tech rather than more tech. And at the same time, we need better use cases that go beyond speculation to onboard more money.

A Case For Less Tech

Blockchains are complex by design. They’re based on redundancy which liberates state-keeping from gated databases. Blockspace, which is a vessel for updating state, is not that easy to produce and comes at costs of complexity. There is no free lunch.

Developers and entrepreneurs come forth proposing chain abstractions of various forms. These solutions should make it easier for people to interact with blockchains e.g. bundling wallets in a convenient way, bridge from chain to chain, and deploy applications cheaper and faster. In a sense, they are an intermediary between the blockspace and the user.

At a high level, chain abstraction is bundling blockspace with developer tooling/composable infra and then serving it to users. But are we possibly roundtripping centralization through over-engineered solutions? Does it mean that at the end of the day, we will end up with a fancy multisig as the “AWS of the Web3”?

If you don’t think abstracting is the solution but you’re still tech-maxi then you are probably on the lookout for the next ZK/FHE miracle that will scale and prove the proofs so our normie neighbours can use blockchains. Thus the solution for the technological friction today could be narrowed down to:

1. Less tech: Abstracting complexity (compromise)

2. More tech: Scaling & bridging (faster, cheaper, seamless tx)

That means to onboard the next 500 million users we need scalable and interoperable blockchains and/or less complex interaction for users and developers to do the blockchaining.

Builders persistently pitch wallets and generic apps touting better UX as a means of onboarding new users to crypto or stealing a portion of the Metamask market share. On the user side crypto does not need better UX - it needs new use cases. Giving people more fun or useful things to do.

Coming up with use cases is much harder than copying what has been already done and adding a marginal twist to make it look original. Many of the applications are built with “ought to” in mind - “users should want to own their data/use governance” and ”Twitter should not have this much power”, rather than embracing the actual demand.

Thus I do not think the problem is the tech, but it’s the failure of imagination when it comes to use cases. At the moment we need new applications. Given that there’s more money in crypto than ideas with proper execution we end up in a Lollapalooza of crypto cycles.

The Professionalization Of Lollapalooza

When you don’t know what to build - you build more tech. If you don’t know what to do with money - you do finance. If you are bored - you browse memes on the internet. Crypto does it all in one escapist movement.

Crypto finds itself in a macrocycle I refer to as degentropy. This is best summarized as “speculation is the wedge”. Speculation is eating crypto and crypto is eating speculation. The way I see the past and future is in the following macrocycles:

1. 2009-2014 Cypherpunk movement (conception)

2. 2014-2020 Startupization of crypto (entropy)

3. 2020-2025 Crypto entertainment (degentropy)

4. 2025+ Deployment phase (negentropy) ???

At the moment the industry is trapped in polar opposites of dystopian embracing of memes with no intrinsic value and utopian techno promises offering no solution to hard questions of the present. No one focuses on answering the hard questions (use cases). This is how degentropy looks in a picture:

While at the end of the cycle, midcurvers will be right again, it also probably means they will not make (and lose) money. Crypto becomes a reality gambling on the future; everyone is both a tech and meme investor, and everyone can participate in the zeitgeist because there is no barrier of entry.

Both the left and right curve continue to play this pretend game because it can be profitable (the midcurve gets sucked in anyways as they become the exit liquidity). The rules of the game are simple. Sell the most tokens to whoever is willing to buy. Is there something wrong with that? Is it lacking fundamentals? 

Might sound like whataboutism but how can we anchor it to realness when the economy itself hangs on an alchemy few can justify without relying on the performative economics of the kayfabe? One could argue the global consultancy market of $400BN is also a joke but the fact that it is established makes it hard for people to stop participating in this specific pretend play.

The fact is that markets have largely become an entertainment business. That’s what streaming information 24/7 does to society. Crypto offers a great product-market fit for this peak performative era. We’re blurring the lines between gaming and reality.

C'est la vie. This is not a normative analysis; me saying this is bad. I am merely pointing out how the financial game evolves. This evolution enabled something that prospectively looks valueless but could become invaluable (and most back again to valueless). 

Following the money in this day and age means following the Lollapalooza flow. If you can play this game - congratulations you have skills to sell at a faster rate than KOLs. But for now, in my book, crypto is mostly an entertainment industry. We are in the business of selling tokens.

I do not believe this is the final form of crypto. I would guess a big bust – a true disillusionment –  is still looming ahead. The crypto dotcom bubble equivalent is yet to happen. Why do I think so? 

1. Most of what we see funded is tech for the sake of the tech

2. Blockchains have not scaled to meet the mainstream demand

3. Very few consumer-oriented use cases

4. Institutional enabling and TradFi adoption will be premature and ultimately act as dumb money 

Despite what you think, we’re not ready or worthy to meaningfully absorb trillions of institutional inflows. That is the last piece of my puzzle. If the flows are enabled and blessed via ETFs we’re allowing the final degen boss to enter the last leg of the macrocycle that began in 2020.

At a high level, the success of crypto depends only on onboarding more money into the game. In the short run, its success could become a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the financial degeneracy sets the very system crypto sought to replace on fire. In the long run…

In hindsight, things may seem inevitable. Sometimes the difference between inevitable and impossible is very small – perhaps just a couple of weeks of price action. I’d like to explore that difference with the benefit of hindsight. 

Two interacting forces form crypto bull markets. The top-down flow of resources (capital) and the bottom-up flow of products (ideas). Marrying capital with the right idea leads to an innovation trigger or, at least, an imagination trigger. This is when exploration turns into exploitation.

I will share personal anecdotes from past years and after that discuss the difference in explore versus exploit stages of the cycle. As a closing remark, I will conclude with possible future scenarios and a personal commentary. 

The Setup: Resources

In crypto, we have experienced a rapid transition from peak fear through peak apathy to a high expectation environment. All this in roughly 12 months. We can say the collective always displays a lack of foresight, yet the momentum created by the crowd corners individual decision-making.

After peak fear in late 2022, most investors were apprehensive to deploy capital while some have written off crypto completely. During the peak apathy of summer 2023, many deterred deploying as they thought about capital constraints - present and the future, as the macroeconomic momentum painted bleak prospects.

As the market surged in late 2023 driven by top-down narratives of ETFs and the opportunity that was the oversold Solana, it started to create a perfect storm for capital allocators in the market. Talking to many peer investors during 2023 I have to say few, if any, expressed optimism. Few of those that had resources were actually deploying them.

Many investors in crypto, both on the liquid and venture side, were caught by surprise expecting six more months of winter to say the least when the markets suddenly turned bullish. The prospects of a golden bull run happened almost overnight and investors suddenly felt cornered. 

Those on the liquid side are rushing to buy coins they should have bought a year ago and VCs, those who do have resources, are chasing the hottest narratives – mostly L2s and AI vaporware. We can tell this by observing the number of rounds that are:

1. Oversubscribed

2. KOL/angel-only  

3. Priced aggressively

4. Closing at the end of the week

Those who felt overallocated in December 2022 do feel underallocated in March 2024. The capital inflows in liquid funds have picked up pace in late 2023 followed by capital calls of venture funds, those few who still have resources at their disposal.

Drawing from my personal experience of raising a venture capital crypto fund from mid-2023 until now, it was almost impossible to find actively allocating LPs. On the fund-of-fund (FoF) side most were struggling to raise themselves, delaying capital deployment every quarter, and those few who had resources went with bigger names.

In the summer of 2023, one of the GPs at a large FoF said they are sweating for every $500k check. Another FoF disclosed in a private conversation they had talked to around 100 crypto VC funds raising in 2023 (I can’t even name that many) but allocated to none. This was not exclusively a crypto phenomenon as risk-on capital dried up across the board.

For crypto, there was however an additional micro-crisis to the general macro meltdown - the FTX story. Shortly before the FTX blowup, I had a conversation with a US-based FoF who said they have committed tens of millions to crypto managers but the FoF itself will only start raising in late 2022. I have not heard about them actually raising successfully. Many LPs found themselves unable to honour their capital commitments when crypto funds came calling.  

The FTX situation has also postponed the entry of new capital into crypto, many smaller and bigger family offices and funds who were eager to get crypto exposure lost interest. Few investors are actually able to think independently and that’s why we have manias and disillusionments. 

However, comparing the crypto winter of 2018 and 2022/23 is that TradFi was giving crypto a much greater benefit of the doubt to bounce back. Actually, pre-FTX almost everyone in TradFi I talked to, who was not in crypto or marginally in, thought that crypto is here to stay. That was absolutely not the case in 2018.

To summarize, from my (limited) personal experience, venture and liquid allocators were sidelined by the rapid change in sentiment. This means a funnel has been created around existing narratives and the market is picking up pace.

The bull catalysts are the top-down inflow of capital into ETFs and liquid crypto funds, repricing the secondary market (already happening). On the primary side of things, I expect resources flowing to crypto VC to increase in the second half of 2024, but mostly in 2025, fueling the already competitive primary market.

The Setup: Ideas

The bear market turned into a quick purge by Luna collapse and FTX blow-up, the sellers sold fast and those still in the arena remained shell-shocked. If they were allocating it was with an uneasy feeling. The inflow of founders dried up as many turned their sight to the AI bandwagon.

The narrative reset came fast. The disillusionment period in crypto serves to explore new ideas, choosing the best ones that get exploited in a narrative turning to mania. The exploration phase sets the scene for what later turns into a copycat race. Exploration is the search for the fabled “innovation trigger”.

Throughout 2023 the dealflow was the most diverse as there were no particularly strong narratives. There was some clustering around e.g. intents, ZK, rollups/L2s, ordinals, and some others, mostly on the infra side. 

Founders were actually forced to think for a while before getting VCs excited. At this point, both founders and investors were keen to explore. This is when crypto is at its creative finest. Marginal improvements over the hot thing don’t work as much as there is no hot enough thing. But excitement over things doesn't really last in the bear market.

As the market soared in late 2023, the search for an “innovation trigger” concluded – the cards were dealt. I believe the Overton window of this bull market has been set. It does not mean, however, that the best performers are already out there and investible.

Uniswap was probably one of the most copied products in the past cycle, however, the second most copied product, the godfather of DeFi 2.0, OlympusDAO, only came a couple of months after DeFi summer. There is still space to innovate, however, one has to do so by exploiting the existing narratives. 

The narrative with the highest potential that we see today:

1. Crypto AI/Agents

2. Restaking

3. Layer 2

4. ZK

5. Infrastructure

6. DeSci

7. SocialFi/Web3 Social

The above are rather under-defined categories, more like buzzwords that serve to vaguely identify what people are building. Many products could be a combination of two or more of the above. The winners will be those who’ll master user acquisition via two traditional tools: yield and leverage. “Number going up” is always the best user experience.

Explore vs Exploit

Let us discuss in brief the game theory of explore/exploit. There are two acts for a crypto cycle. The one where people are forced to come up with seemingly new things and the one where people exploit these new things with inflated narratives. 

In the bear markets, we are stuck in a local maxima. As the old narratives have crumbled and they cannot prop up the market further, founders are forced to explore and investors are hesitantly willing to follow. The “innovation trigger” is the potential foothill of the new global maxima. This becomes the objective of the exploration around which new narratives could be built.

Founders are back at the drawing board as the previous ideas are a dead-end, expanding the exploration space. As the prices keep dipping or growing stagnant, the greater the incentive to abandon the safety of the old narratives and explore greater surface area for the potential novelty.

And at some point, the explorers set a sight on what could become a foothill of a new global maxima. Usually, the forming of the foothill is a function of novelty and price recovery. While this could be more of a correlation rather than causation - it’s good enough to start climbing up and form narratives at large.

The climb up signals the exploration phase is over, we set up a basecamp and began to exploit the market's momentum. At this point, the reflexive relationship between novelty and price action begins to push the global maxima higher. The price becomes a leading indicator of adoption. 

As of March 2024, it seems that we have found the foothill and everyone is rushing to climb the new mountain - as it seemingly offers better payoff than to explore further.

What’s Next?

The exploration phase is over and given that most investors are reactive they will not waste time exploring but double down on exploiting since they have to cover the lost ground. Funding rounds beginning to get oversubscribed signal investors are already in full exploit mode. 

2024 is similar to 2020 and 2016 – years marked by mostly internal hype. The actively participating retail base in crypto is already higher than was in 2020 meaning we already begin at a higher watermark. Despite innovating very little in the last two years, we are powering through with resources.

The exploiters focus on resources while explorers focus on ideas. There is a subtle difference between being an investor and “being in the business of investing” (investor versus allocator). 

The exploit strategy is also a function of size. Most funds with an abundance of resources are exploit-only because innovation or exploration is not capital-intensive as competing on the exploit axis. There is much more dumb money than outsiders would believe and insiders would admit.

Given that during any mania the abundance of capital seeks the scarce genius, many compromise to meet their deployment targets. Or as Hobart & Huber put it: “While genius is rare, the demand of the credulous will always be met by a healthy supply of fraud”. The expectations get inflated and founders are incentivized to enter resource wars, subsidizing yields of exotic kinds.

The top-down flow of capital will also increase gradually as the fundraising machine of VCs has already begun to move. The early internal competition for rounds means that until the retail arrives en masse the insiders and institutional money will prop up the market. Also retail is not one homogeneous mass but various waves of adoption within a cycle. 

Those who were afraid the most are transforming into fearless bulls. But this is just the other side of insecurity. Good to keep in mind that insecurity is the mother of greed and there is an abundance of insecurity in the market these days.

The truth is there hasn’t been much innovation in crypto in the past two years so it is hard to see this bull run as a standalone from the previous one. Thematically it seems to be an extension of the previous cycle but with size, as the yield arbitrage gets more lucrative and the institutional floodgates opened with ETFs.

For an unhinged mania – an imagination trigger is a more potent ingredient than an innovation trigger. The reflexivity has been let loose again and most people in the space are endorsing kayfabe. The role of credit has still not played out this cycle.

A couple months ago I wrote in our investor letter:

Every crypto cycle tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. 2017 ruined itself by overindulging in the ICO mania, the 2021 by overleveraging the DeFi narrative; the underlying principle of every mania is the imitative scramble for immediate wealth.

This move upward has started with a top-down flow of institutional capital. No true shiny new thing. The foundation of the potential upcoming mania is the institutional inflow (and credit?) and the price action itself. Will this cycle perish by excess exposure to tutes?

Thanks to Arthur0x, Long_solitude, Luffistotle for providing feedback.

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Memecoins, particularly Doge, emerged as a real crypto genre in the past bull market. But not only meme coins are subject to memetic premium. Every successful token in existence is subject to it. I would go even further and argue that every product wrapped in brand includes memetic premium.

Memetic premium is a phenomenon in which people attribute higher monetary value to an idea because they:

1. See other people value an idea as well 

2. Expect more people to value the idea

Memetic premium is an imitative (mimetic) Keynesian beauty contest that lasts forever. It is a pure form of speculation that existed before humanity knew what financial speculation meant. As Plato speaks to us through Durant:

“Men soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not, they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.”

In the social media-dominated world speculation became a novel form of consumption. What used to be serious became entertainment, while entertainment became serious. We are polluting entertainment with politics and making a spectacle of war or inflation. Crypto plays into this culture shift.

While in the last cycle, the degening was portrayed as the dark and fringe side of crypto, it made the cycle. Jpegs, memecoins and yield ponzis became the entertainment. Even the meltdown and scapegoating of Three Arrows, Do Kwon and SBF was broadcasted and widely consumed with a sense of enjoyment.

And while the most “serious” crypto investors were talking about crypto infrastructure SaaS, the degen side of crypto has grown and, I think, we are poised for the most spectacular degening ever seen in crypto. We are doubling down on the insanity - whether it’s memecoins, SocialFi, GameFi or restaking.

Whereas last cycle memetic premium was more implicit, this cycle it will become fully explicit. Crypto will become more degen than ever before. And that could mean you don’t have to buy Doge to buy into memes. You can buy any coin out there because the cat is out of the bag - every coin is a memecoin.

The Anatomy Of (3,3)

I have previously elaborated on how there is nothing fundamental about Coke Inc stock other than its brand and subsequent customer demand. I have proposed that speculating on coins is a form of consumption, the same way drinking sugar water is. The value of Coke Inc is just a sticky Lollapalooza (RIP Charlie Munger).

Munger was not a big crypto fan dubbing it cryptoshit and cryptocrapo. While his infinite wit will be sorely missed, his outdated view on what can be bought and sold, less so. Anyways, I believe that if Munger was in his 20s or 30s, his Poor Charlie’s Almanack would include a chapter on the memetic premium.

I merely propose to amend some of our outdated wisdom with these experimental constructs we value in trillions today. They may be small and individual odds of success fickle but they are growing. Rather than normatively reject them, the cynics should try to understand them better. After all; technology is a substrate upon which society happens. Not the other way around.

Let’s make an effort to understand crypto as a consumer product rather than normatively object over how it is consumed. Capitalism is powered by markets and markets are driven by consumption. 

Speculation is also a form of consumption. Every brand in this world relies on the memetic premium. The (3,3) narrative that ruled OlympusDAO in 2021 explicitly expressed memetic premium.

And this is where we’re finding ourselves on the crypto adoption curve: the transition from memes for the sake of memes to memes with utility (aka SocialFi). I hope that at this point we can agree that all of our coins rely on memetic premium to a large extent - and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In this cycle, memes will become directly monetizable and there is less of a need to bet on memecoins. Memes serve as a coordination tool and pricing them is a social game. I would not be surprised to see dumb memecoin value pivot into smaller coordination experiments with “infinity” upside.

The equivalent of our DeFi summer could be a meme summer wrapped in a narrative of SocialFi (Blast season currently seems like a Schelling point). Instead of buying into one overplayed singular meme that is Doge and a long tail of copycats, people might play various mini-games with some degree of purpose. 

After all, money is a coordination game and price is a signal. OlympusDAO’s (3,3) was a demonstration of a meme that had it all: GameFi, SocialFi and a serious attempt at utility. It has been a true memecoin, even more so than Doge. Because if you see a memecoin as a mere memecoin, the magic that is the retardation of the crowd is bound to be ephemeral.

Learning how to price memes was always the alchemy that is finance. The memes back in the market wizards' age were different. From the invention of derivatives all the way to the memecoins, finance is evolving because markets spill over into the unbounded digital world. 

To fully leverage the power of crypto means to understand reflexivity not in terms of things going up or down but in terms of price-transforming fundamentals. The world is malleable to markets’ whims. Memetic premium is a potential energy ready to be transformed into kinetic energy.

The late 2020s and 2030s could be the golden era of memetic-value-oriented crypto hedge funds embracing the inherent reflexive nature of digital assets. Crypto might have been in denial about itself for a while but we can maximize the value it truly offers only once we embrace its true nature.

I can barely see when the alarm clock wakes me up at 3 am in the morning. Godamnit. Why did they have to do the airdrop at such an inconvenient time for poor Europeans like myself? My vision is still blurry when I stand up as there is no time to waste. The city outside is still asleep. I open the window to let the stink out and limp into the kitchen to make myself a cup of instant coffee.

As I hobble in I’m scrolling through X. Ok, Elon just tweeted “30 mins to take-off”. Sorry, he did not tweet, he x-ed. He banned the word tweet and Twitter. If you type that shit it won’t let you post, if you do it again, your x-ing ability is suspended for 1 minute, if you do it again it’s 5 minutes, and so on.

I guess if you have the “X Premium + Pro Enterprise God” tier, which is like 100k DOGE you can tweet, shit I mean, you can X any word without being blocked or paying extra. You can actually pay per word. Some words get really expensive at some times. I tried to x “Trump” one day and would have to pay like 50k DOGE to post. Posting on trending topics is getting really expensive.

Slurping my coffee. Mmmmm so good. Gonna wake me up. Let me go back to the room to sit at my desktop…all the tabs on my screens are ready for the X.COM coin airdrop. This is the biggest event ever for a degen trader like myself. Maybe for the whole of humanity, huh? A year ago, who could have imagined?

Shit man, it was a crazy year. I have to chuckle when thinking back to how Elon took DOGE private at $1 and made it a stablecoin. Who would have thought just a couple of months ago that DOGE goes 10x the market capitalization of other stablecoins? 

What a chad move. And then, the mfer made everyone transact in DOGE. Next week the congress is doing a hearing on Why FED’s new CBDC should be DOGE.It’s truly happening. The DOGEization of the dollar. 

You would think this is where Elon stops but no. After this move he lists part of the X stock back to NYSE, which pumps to $1000. In a couple of weeks, he announces the X.COM airdrop transferring all the value to a token that he’ll launch. 

The mfer posted it on X but did not clarify and X Inc stock plummeted to 11 cents in 20 minutes. Then he posted a clarification on the X stock buyback and airdrop allocation - the chart went crazy. 

That was the fastest $900 to almost zero, back to 10k in a matter of days. Insanity. I thought I knew what volatility was. LOL. Fucking Elon. He always surprises.

When he announced the airdrop would only go to the “Premium + Pro” and above tiers everyone started to buy higher tiers. Luckily I had it before. More airdrop allo for me, poor degen. Let me look at the distribution chart again. Ah ok, here it is:

50% X users

20% X.COM stock holders

19% Elon

8% DOGE holders post-2023

2% DOGE holders pre-2023

1% AOC

The whole AOC saga is wild. As she got into another spat with Elon he replied that he would give her 1% of X.COM coin supply if she quits the office within 24 hours and never went into politics again. After 6 hours she resigned, citing her inability to make a real difference as a politician as a reason for resignation. She is now an evangelist for DOGE as a means of decentralizing equality. 

The noise in the streets enters my room as I’m slurping the hot coffee going over the charts. Someone is yelling outside my building. I get up to look out from the window. Oh, of course - it’s just an NPC2PC streamer. I can tell by the telescopic holder attached to his back. This NPC streaming X feature is getting really annoying. I hope they will introduce a regulation soon.

When Elon announced an NPC2PC mode six months ago it became the most popular feature ever adopted by people on social media. He posted on X: 

“I always wanted to play GTA in real life.” 

In a week he announced a new mode on X. It took him and his Boring Company a week to start shipping telescopic phone handles that attach to people's backs giving people the ability to recreate the 3rd person camera view.

Anyone on X could now sell their time as a playable character on whose control people are bidding live, giving them commands through headphones. It seems like every 10th person on the street is an X playable character. Famous influencers are now becoming the X playable characters as they can make so much money. And just last week the X NPC2PC mode will introduce a NSFW version in partnership with PornHub.

Bullish news, hopefully, will pump the X.COM coin even more. Oh wait, Elon just x-ed:

 “20 minutes to takeoff!”

Sweet. Just out of boredom I check my X shares. Oh yes - it’s a rad feature. When Elon learned about this crypto-fad called Friendtech he decided to implement a similar feature into X - allowing people to tokenize their future X revenue. Everyone can buy my tokenized shares. I actually use it as collateral to go long X.COM coin futures. 

My X share price is down today - 7% down from ATH. Maybe I can pump my share a little bit? Let me buy some…Goddamnit. What is that noise again? 

I walk up to the window and I see the street lighting illuminating two X NPC2PCs screaming as they fight. It looks grotesque as they have to wait for the commands. This is getting on my nerves. I shut down the window so I don’t get distracted. Back to my computer.

Elon posting again. “Before the BIG launch I have BIG news to share with all of you.”

I’m thinking this is good. More news is bullish. BIG news is megabullish. I wonder what it is. Wait a sec. No way. NOOO WAAAY! This is absolutely sick.

“Me and AOC are expecting a baby and we will name it X, just X”

Wow. I did not expect that. But after all, this is the world of Elon’s razor. Let me look at X.COM price prediction on Thales. Perfect, green candle. We’re up 5%. 

This is the greenest 1-minute candle I’ve seen since they announced X.COM coin token design and the fact that you would have to stake the token to participate and get verified while earning fees generated on the platform.

Staking and slashing turned out to be the best bot protection mechanism. That is why X.COMCHAIN is hailed as the “truth chain”. The foundation behind it is called AIDA - the AI Defense Alliance. Elon claims it is the last bastion of resistance against AI taking over the world. 

Every image or headline posted on X has to enter the “truth chain” where validators verify if it’s true or false. It usually takes up to 3 hours to reach truth finality. Anyone who has interacted with it in a positive way, e.g. re-shared, and it turns out to be a misinformation or AI-altered, will be slashed in favor of users curating/interacting in a truthful manner with the piece of media or information.

The validators are run by the biggest media companies that had to buy in for 100M DOGE. Even Saudis and All-In podcasters are running a validator.

To agree on the truth it requires 51% of the network to validate. The validators who take the opposite side are slashed. None of the validators can see the other’s validation before everyone casts a vote. The slashed stake goes to the validators who voted for the truth.

It is a crazy design. It’s the pinnacle of crypto achievement. Let me look at my portfolio. Sweet. I'm well into 10 digits these past couple of days. Multigenerational wealth. I feel like a conqueror here in this dark 40sqm shitty apartment, behind my screen, looking at these green candle warriors of mine. Soon, I will sell some. Just after this glorious launch pump. Then I will buy a castle somewhere.

It’s funny. Just a year ago I was one of the victims of this recession and look at me today. Crypto was my only option. Nothing was growing, everything was down. The economic downturn, the war, the unrest, and the general feeling of gloom turned into a supercycle. The world felt stagnant and suddenly we WERE ON. Things started to happen. Good things.

Tradfi all jumped into crypto after the ETFs. Out of nowhere, crypto was hailed as the “new emerging market. “Whereas in the past the emerging markets were geographical…” - massive headlines. 

All of the sovereign funds are now advised by Balaji after he published his book “Network Wealth: New Emerging Market”. Suddenly the $1M bitcoin price was not seen as outlandish but a question of when - we’re nearly there. No central bank or sovereign wealth fund wanted to be the last to the party, so the secret buying started.

But I never bought bitcoin. I got into this by buying $HAIR tokens. Because hair is money. I run my hand through my full hairline. This is the best year of my life…

“10 mins to take off. Buckle up.”

OMG. I can’t wait. Hm. There’s not much to do in the meantime. Let me look at NPC2PC on X. What’s going on? It’s not as great as it used to be the first month. I was lucky to bid on a soldier fighting somewhere in Ukraine who was streaming as a playable character. They banned it pretty fast.

It just occurred to me, what if…what if this is going to be the “sell the news” type of event? I already forgot the feeling of a big red candle. The last one I saw was when they announced Elon would get 19% of the token supply. But then he said he needs it only to add more collateral for the DOGE. So we were green again after a couple of days. Maybe I should derisk?

3% up again. Fuck it. I’m all in! Will post this on X. Shit, the “all in” phrase is kinda expensive to post today. Nevermind. I can afford it. Post. Nice. Good engagement. Mmmmm. Let me have a look at what people post.

“Signs of froth are indistinguishable from the mainstream adoption”

True. What a smart guy. I wonder who this…Su Zhu guy is. Let me follow him. Pretty cheap to follow him. Good man. I click to buy $SUZHU shares - it looks like up only. Damn. I’m out of coffee. Need to make some more. I walk into the kitchen humming “I only care about your crypto boy, not gonna get me if you hold less than 1 bitcoin…”

I look at the clock. 3:25. Okay. I have 5 minutes. I wonder how much we pump. 20% is the consensus expectation. Cramer says he is not expecting anything less than 20% and even that he’d consider underwhelming. I must agree. If you look at how things were going recently.

3:27

Damn. My hands are getting sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy. I’m getting excited. Must be steady. I had a dream about X.COM hitting a 10 trillion market cap. After all, trading volumes of X users' shares are like 50 billion. Let me sit down behind the screen.

3:29

Okay. Here we go, boys. My heart is beating so fast. Elon is posting on X.

“🚀”

3:30

WE’RE FUCKING LIVE!!! Let’s go. Let me check my wallet. Oh yes - there it is! X.COM coins landed in my wallet. It’s pumping! We’re 10% up! WOW. In just under a minute. Another 3%. Let me look at what people say on my timeline…

“The greatest financial conversion of stock to digitally native tokens. History books will write about this.”

Sweet but…WTF??!! Down 30%? Must be a glitch. Let me refresh…no way. I glance over X and see a post by @ivangbi: “WHAT DA ACTUAL FUCK? I’M POOR AGAIN!!! HOW DO I TURN OFF THE LEVERAGE??!!” 

I’m clicking refresh. 50% down? This can’t be happening. What is going on…OMG, DOGE is decoupling. I have to sell something. I have to sell something quickly. My hands are trembling. I am perspiring like I was running a marathon.

Quickly. Let me sell. How much? Just sell everything! It does not go through. What now? Trying again. 

IT DOES NOT FUCKING GO THROUGH. What? Pausing trading? How can you pause it when it’s going down? Let me transfer it to a wallet. Quick. I knew I should have not held it on a CEX. I notice Elon’s post:

“ON IT! Deploying more collateral. Should stabilize.”

Oh my god. I need to sell. ASAP. Goddamn it. Withdrawals disabled. Fuck me. What to do? I am pulling my hair out screaming in agony. What just happened? I sit quietly for minutes. Could be an hour glancing at the screen. I’m down 99%. This can’t be real.

Elon posting:

“ 1) What ”

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Another word for middleware is infrastructure and apparently, this is the promised land these days. All of this magic space between L1 and the application is the thing we should be excited about. Infrastructure is the future. Alongside AI and ZK…and modular stuff and you know…more buzzwords.

Lots of big VCs these days have to justify their existence while amassing large AUMs from those who understand very little about the space. The fact is, there is very little creativity in crypto and innovation is in short supply. That’s why infrastructure is a default response. It’s an easy way out - a developer purgatory.

As there are very few users in crypto besides airdrop-hunting bots, crypto redeems itself in a B2B narrative. It is hinting at a warmly familiar thing that makes money in Web2 - B2B SaaS. You don’t sell to users (as there are none), you sell to other businesses (of which there are plenty).

So as the boardrooms of pension funds learn that homomorphic encryption is actually not a scientific term for closeted gay, everyone gazes towards the coldhearted technobabble that this is the infrastructure. Follow the money they say.

Selling Shovels

There is a small problem with the crypto B2B concept in the introduction. There are plenty of businesses in crypto selling services to other crypto businesses - but who are the customers of the other crypto businesses? You guessed it - the other other crypto businesses.

One thing is missing and that is money. 

There’s no B without money. Unless, there are VCs with a bunch of money (that can’t be shoveled anywhere else) ready to subsidize the thriving developer-to-developer ecosystem, or as we call it - dev2dev.

This however cannot last forever BUT it can last for a while. Say 2 years? Right on for the 4-year cycle (for those who believe in astrology). It’s risky but it has worked in the past. 

Acronyms and buzzwords sell well because they can mean anything. In other words; you can technobabble yourself to the point where no one actually knows what you’re talking about. This is how you end up with an inward-looking developer circlejerk pumped by institutional dollars.

If you don't see the actual product then the chances are you are the product. So at this point, in Web3, devs are the product with a perfect product/market fit for VCs who can allocate capital and then raise new funds because “we need new infrastructure” also “building infra is hard and takes time”.

What we end up with is the same as the self-referential token yield feedback loop but this time it's a “composable” infrastructure self-referential dev2dev ecosystem. It is expected that in the end the retail normies buy tokenized devs.

Resources vs Creativity

Infrastructure indeed needs improvements. But it’s questionable whether it should be built top-down before the users come. Amazon was the first user of AWS which was built for internal use and only by coincidence, rather than a design, it became the core Web 2 infra.

Those who own the users are in the best position to build downstream. I hate to burst your ETH-maxi decentralization bubble but if Metamask funnels its own order-flow exclusively into its builder they build every single block (could have already happened, maybe check the chain?).

It’s not in Lex Luthor's interest to inspire a rebrand of a certain deep-tech media company to Metamaskless so this re-centralization attack vector is unlikely to materialize anytime soon. But this gives you an idea of how fragile the decentralized stack/infrastructure narrative is.

Nonetheless, the disingenuous infrastructure narrative remains a seemingly conservative bet. It’s a great analogy from the big tech era, boomers are receptive to it because it’s a familiar concept. So if you bundle a sexy buzzword of ZK with the infrastructure SaaS analogy - the institutional investors are biting. 

The predictable returns of selling picks and shovels look so good when served hot in the corporate boardroom. This is how the trickling-down institutional narrative meets the unimaginative developers and serial founders looking for lifestyle business wrapped into a technobabble moonshot.

The big VCs will hardly sell doubling down on this past cycle’s crypto insanity to their LPs. Also, it is cheap to fund creativity. Great ideas usually do not require heavy investments. That is why VCs will obsess about resources and to them developers are resources that need to be funded.

What I expect is that the next innovation trigger will be funded by 1% of the capital that has been flowing into crypto startups in the last few years, meaning the majority of money funneled into resources will be outperformed by very little capital backing creativity. 

The truth is money is not an issue of innovation in crypto - ideas (+ execution) are.

Although in funding infra (and the heavy resources this requires) one finds the most competition, the high stakes games today are not played at the infrastructure level. Sayre’s law applies here:

"In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."

This is embodied in a quote often attributed to Henry Kissinger; “The politics of the university are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low". When the objective differences are small you need to compete ferociously to maintain a difference of one sort or another. The difference is often more imaginary than real so here are twenty L2s and ZKbs that need to be funded. 

After all, VCs maxed out the L1 narrative. They squeezed all the juice from that lemon and more. Today they refocus on the infrastructure while avoiding the most important question; where are the users? Along the way, they conveniently overlook existing infrastructure projects that have been building for a while.

Infrastructure Arbitrage

How to creatively leverage dumb money backing the technobabble? Are there infrastructure projects that are actually worth backing? - There are exceptions that will test the generalization I put forth. There are certainly interesting and important efforts in building the Web 3 infra.

As I have mentioned before, on the investment side at Zee Prime we have been active in the infrastructure in the past years and most of what we see today is just recycling the old ideas and products or shoehorning to fit current trends (ZK, L2, etc.). The difference is; that they are gated and not freely available on the secondary market.

While attending Token 2049 I noticed that the free alpha vendor and people’s champ Arthur Hayes was subtly shilling Filecoin. This made me realize that playing the infrastructure game on the secondary could be a solid arbitrage. The private rounds infra bets are banking on novelty that is mostly illusory. 

The novelty often comes with a high price tag borne by big VCs only to then race to the bottom once the unlocks materialize. There could be an alternative way to play the infra game. Whether it’s storage or decentralized RPC (something we actually need), account abstraction, indexing, and much more. 

The early winners of the 2020 DeFi summer were not teams manufactured by VCs but projects that have been around innovating and executing for some time, whether it was Synthethix or Aave.

If digging deep one can find well-funded teams with heavily discounted tokens on the secondary market. Not to mention much more favorable distribution to its private round equivalent. It’s a risky bet but it would not be the first time the publicly traded market outperformed the VC benchmark.

When the shiny new toy in fact is not that shiny and it comes with heavy VC bags attached, maybe one could avoid it. After all, the opportunity to fund great tech companies was never a matter of a few private rounds, nor a couple of months. It was at minimum a multi-year opportunity. 

If you must bet on infra, maybe consider the experienced and bear market-harden teams that have been building for years. After all, Hayes has much bigger traps than most VCs and you know big traps equal alpha.

Thanks to Jakub, Kpop Luffy, Rap, Dermot, Ivan, Catrina, and Evan of Portal Ventures, for conversations, proofreading, and useful comments.

Disclaimer: Zee Prime has invested in many infrastructure/middleware projects including Filecoin, Pocket Network, Biconomy, Subsquid, etc. so this represents a biased view.