Fabric

hi 

been heads down on something new. wanted to share some thoughts on building for creators and consumers in crypto the past ~3yrs

there's roughly 10k (+/- 5k) real monthly transacting users in consumer crypto and their desire for new metas is insatiable

for builders, this presents two possible outcomes:

1) (default) you build a thing and no one cares. no one uses it

2) you build a thing and it becomes a meta (hypersub experienced this briefly). people use it for a little while but eventually get bored. a new meta emerges and everyone moves on

from here your options are:

3) go back to the drawing board

4) chase the new meta

gaining traction is really hard and most builders don't want to give it up. so most chase, hoping their thing will eventually transcend the cycle and achieve breakout success by gaining adoption among a wider audience

but outside of infra and trading, thats never happened. (fun thought experiments: why not? will it ever? if so, what are likely to be the causal factors?)

so—

5) you can stay the course, keep grinding, and hope that the castle you've been building in someone else's kingdom eventually prospers 

or

6) exit

5 leads to burnout if you're bootstrapped and bankruptcy if you're vc-backed. hope is not a strategy (sorry)

you can exit to a categorically different market, or to a different segment of crypto. the former likely means ai, the later means infra or trading. the problem is that you're late. the market has matured, incumbents have a lot of leverage, and its hard to differentiate 

we don't bear the risks and opportunity costs of becoming founders so that other men will come to our rescue. we do it because of an irrational belief in our own abilities. my advice: build where there's durable demand. sans infinite runway or corporate sponsorship you'll die otherwise 

i realize this sounds negative and pessimistic. sorry about that, not my intention. this message is for the builders who are trying to figure out where to invest their time and energy. its what i wish someone shared with me when i started

if you're a founder and struggling with figuring out where and what to do next, hmu happy to share more 1:1

rooting for every single one of you 💛

https://farcaster.xyz/nonlinear.eth/0x96c90863

Consumer crypto is still in its “GPT-2 moment”: the infrastructure works, growth curves are bending upward, and a true inflection point is close. 

What makes crypto distinct from Web2 is that it turns everything into a market. Early products look like trading hubs and casinos because they can profit with only a handful of users that can tolerate high fees, but that ceiling is low, since most people aren’t gamblers.

The next wave of crypto consumer apps will monetize by building full-fledged economies around their products. Farcaster is at the edge of this. That changes the game in two ways:

- Higher LTV per user. When users own and trade assets, their economic value skyrockets.
- A bigger, slower path to scale at first. We’re at the early stage of the S curve here. To cross the chasm, teams must abandon the comfortable, highly profitable niche and chase mainstream users. Revenue per user starts lower, but total revenue balloons as the user base compounds. 

There is already 250B worth of Stablecoins circulating, even with today’s small user pool. That is proof that we’re only scratching the surface. Onwards!

Inside you there are two wolves

Both are correct

Inside you there are two wolves

Both are correct

https://farcaster.xyz/nonlinear.eth/0xa1c20f90
https://farcaster.xyz/giu/0x2d3929ce

friendly neighborhood shitcaster // working on @pinetree