@dfern.eth

I wish I had more bandwidth to attend Farcon, I'm sure it was great, but this still feels like "the summer of our discontent." I read this NYT opinion today about the decline of Meta, I agree, but web3 isn't ready to catch the wave. 1. ETH roundtripped after making ATHs last year, lead by DATs. 2. People leaving left & right and/or pivoting to AI if they didn't already do so 2 years ago: Tomasz Stańczak, Péter Szilágyi, Dan Finlay, Josh Stark, not to mention all of Merkle. Layoffs: Coinbase, Eigenlayer, & more 3. The main narratives now are CeFi/RWA stablecoins, CeFi Perps (Hyperliquid) & associated chains alongside prediction markets. The former two being 0% cypherpunk...and prediction markets being on a spectrum of cypherpunky-ness depending on the choice of chain & oracle. 4. X (Twitter) IPOing as a part of SpaceX while crypto languishes. 5. Everything down bad: LayerZero, AAVE, Memecoins (good riddance), Music NFTs (I still want to believe), onchain gaming (fruitling valley being an exception to the rule), DeSci (to be fair, public biotech equities have been worse) 6. DeFi hacks almost every day in April (again LayerZero, Drift, etc) Overall, probably one of the worst times to be in crypto, but the best time to join. Yet everything we know about why decentralization matters still holds true. But the tech has to work, web3 can't be like Mastodon, whose lightning moment came & went with nothing to show for it. I believe the existing web2 giants (FB/IG, Reddit, X, even Youtube) will wither on the vine, the question is whether they get replaced by something better, or we just replay web2 social media musical chairs once again after Myspace, Tumblr, LiveJournal, Google+ etc. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/opinion/meta-facebook-zuckerberg.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hVA.tH0c.3oDXcIUduUue&smid=url-share

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