@itsbasil

we built an industry optimized for those who prefer $500 today over $1,000 tomorrow. until that changes, everything downstream is effectively a zero. liquidity remains capped, velocity is fabricated & every new attempt collapses under the same ceiling of greater fool. this is not a market failure, a user problem, or a talent issue. this is entirely an incentive problem, exasperated by failed leadership, that has now become the sum of those problems. which explains why crypto has been bleeding relevance. the last two to three cycles have failed to match the experimentation, novelty & genuine curiosity of earlier eras. leadership looks confused today because the systems they bought into no longer reward long-term thinking—the only thing they know, leading to desperation & bad decision making. now everyone is reacting, no one is building compounding structures & no one is trying to disrupt anything meaningful. the plot is lost. as you move up the risk curve from bitcoin to eth to l2s to app-level tokens, the expected outcome approaches -90%. not because the products are bad, but because there is no one inside these systems structurally incentivized to care. tokens have been reduced to liquidation instruments rather than primitive growth tools. the irony is that this is happening at the exact moment regulatory pressure has eased enough to allow real experimentation. for the first time, tokens can support revenue sharing, compounding incentives & durable value accrual. and instead of leaning into that optionality, the industry has doubled down on the least interesting interpretation of tokens possible: capital formation as a fast exit. tokens are now framed almost exclusively as early ipos as this new baseless meta takes hold. raise quickly. add liquidity immediately. sell as soon as possible. but public markets work precisely because companies do not go public months after inception. they take years of product iteration, user discovery & trust building before liquidity is introduced. we’ve inverted that order entirely. we built exit tech for vaporware, capital formation for products that don’t exist. there is an alternative path & it is not novel. imagine that. you build something people actually use. you listen. you iterate. you earn early believers. only then do you introduce a token, not as equity, but as a coordination primitive. a way to vest users, reward contribution & align long-term behavior. product comes first. distribution comes second. pmf comes third. capital formation comes later to scale, but only once the path is crystallized. tokens excel at user growth, retention & ecosystem expansion. they are powerful because they can be gamified, distributed & experimented with in ways equity could never. they allow you to pull fungible value from thin air, providing infinite carrots & sharing value day one. treating them as equity prematurely destroys that flexibility & collapses everything into short-term price action. when tokens are used correctly, they fund loyalty before they fund balance sheets. they allow founders to scale without dumping on early users. they create the conditions where smart capital can enter later, on clearer fundamentals, without extracting the very community that made the product viable in the first place. we could have built systems like this. systems that compound. instead, we optimized for traders. for immediate exits. for velocity without gravity. and the result is predictable: the intelligent capital left (or never came), builders are punished & only extractive behavior remains. people are not leaving crypto because the technology failed. they are leaving because the incentives failed, taking anyone with a morale compass with them. we built extraction instead of community, churn instead of value, exits instead of ownership. if tokens are only ever treated as something to sell, they will always collapse. if they are treated as tools for alignment, distribution & long-term coordination, they still have a chance to matter. it is a shame, really. we had the opportunity to rebuild the internet in a way that shares its profits with its very users & instead we chose crime, extraction & making the worst of the bunch ever richer—all because of ego, corruption & stupidity, all of which was avoidable. though perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the end, as prediction markets will eat their lunch anyway & their continued & constant pivots, this time into prediction markets, will ultimately result in a pivot back to the exact thing it was supposed to be all along: shared permissionless value across a new internet. bonus: the irony is again loud. if only we had focused on what actually matters all these years & built proper incentives, we would have the network effects needed to successfully pivot into pmarkets. alas. show goes on.

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