@jacek

If you’re building for a crypto-native audience and your main product is trading, you have to accept the uncomfortable truth: the TAM is tiny and you are not building a consumer app. You’re building for power users, and you’re competing with every other casino on the internet at the same time: Uniswap, pump.fun, OpenSea, Polymarket, the CEXes, all of it. The reason these businesses still work is power laws. A handful of users drive most of the volume. Last month the top 0.2% of OpenSea users did half the volume, and the top 0.06% of Polymarket users did half the volume. That’s the game. The thing that should keep you up at night isn’t onboarding more users, it’s retaining your top accounts. Which is also why defensibility is so weak. Power users are mercenary, incentives work, and a competitor can come out of nowhere and steal a meaningful chunk of your business by poaching a few whales. The only real moat is staying one step ahead and shipping fast. And “shipping fast” in trading means following volume. NFTs get hot, you’re there. Then tokens. Then memes. Then prediction markets. Then whatever is next. There can be dominant companies in each category, but when volume cools, the rational move is often to chase where it goes, because your real product is flow. This is also why the “1B users will become habitual traders” narrative is fantasy. Even if crypto grows massively, the consumer categories are stablecoins, payments, onchain data, and crypto as a feature inside bigger markets. Trading will stay concentrated, niche, and brutally competitive. If you want consumer scale, trading can be a feature, but it can’t be the whole story. Vegas doesn’t sell gambling, it sells the experience. Or you go back to the deeper promise of crypto: open, permissionless networks that expand what software can be. That’s why I’m still building on Farcaster and onchain data. It has a much cleaner path to real consumer breakout than yet another trading venue ever will.

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