polynya (polynya)

Cryptobros shilling PE/revenue/cashflow metrics are always playing a dangerous game. This industry is built on speculation and hodling. Over 90% of trading and transaction fees and related revenues are derived directly from said speculation. The end result of eroding the money religion will lead to a >90% collapse industry-wide. Feeling déjà vu from ranting against the ultrasoundmoney cult a few years back. An especially grave sin is to extrapolate numbers from speculative mania times - you've to look at baseline figures deep into a bear market instead. For those interested in cashflow should look at stocks instead - there's tons of great investment opportunities available.

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Cryptobros have a storied history of repackaging existing paradigms with new buzzwords, casinofying & ponzifying them, removing all safeguards, accountability and democratic structures; adding corruption instead, and shilling them to degenerates IPOs > ICOs Collectibles > NFTs Betting > Prediction markets Public companies > DAOs And countless others, not to mention everything that has failed miserably centuries ago being shilled as some genius innovation, like Terra Luna At least with memecoins there's no pretense, gotta give 'em that The real shame is behind each brazen moneygrab there's always some good tech that has been corrupted to such a grotesque extent that we've forgotten about their potential, let alone realising said potential. ~Governanceless digital protocols are one such case.

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There's a lot of scapegoating and blame games happening of late, but all of it misses the forest for the trees. The only real problem that everything derives of: the growth in application demand has been a negligible fraction of expectations for half a decade now, which has left >99% of infrastructure built unused. No amount of posturing over infra will fix this. The only thing that will is understanding the fundamental properties and limitations of public blockchains; building, improving, and marketing applications that are compatible. While there's certainly a tiny bit more of that now than in the trough of 2023/24 memecoin mania, it's a negligible fraction of where the industry should have been by now. Yes, I've said all of this ad nauseum since 2022, to much hate, and until the industry gets its head out of its rectal cavity and goes 99% in on sensible applications, 1% on infra, 0% on gambling, nothing else matters.

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For my personal use, crypto is in a great place. Fees, speeds, wallet UX, applications are perfectly fine for my usecases, and they'll keep getting better. However, I'd like to see some things significantly improved, in order of importance: - CRITICAL: Configurable withdrawal rate limiting in Safe & smart wallets and indeed, in all smart contracts, should be a standard. Without this, I significantly limit my usage of crypto - Custodial standards for smart wallets - Stage 2+ decentralisation for L2s, complete overhaul for Tron (normies receive USDT on Tron) - EUR stables w/ liquidity - Better frontends & standards - More competition & options for minimal hardware wallets - Range order management for Uniswap V4 - Significantly less volatile, reliable, long-term sustainable and high liquidity SoVs (BTC and ETH are far too erratic) - Integration into widely adopted payment networks, both global and domestic - Some inaccessible assets tokenised as RWAs - Farcaster with bustling non-crypto content/discussions

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Uniswap v4 feels like crypto's first complete product. Uniswap v3 was already nearly there, which is one reason why while previous versions took ~1 year, v4 took 4 years. I can see additional functionality (e.g. unified liquidity) and responding to infra changes (e.g. quantum-resistant zkVMs) that will justify a v5, but the core purpose of this application now feels complete for the foreseeable future. What's remaining is now on the governance & social end. Aave v4 is the next candidate for a complete product. Interestingly, the applications are hitting final form years ahead of the infra they're built on, and in cases like Aave v4, being intertwined with infra itself. (Side-note: of course, simple "products" like memecoins or USDT are "complete")

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A brief on public blockchains Unique property: Strict global consensus A strictly ordered ledger which every participant agrees to exactly. Unique feature enabled: Extralegal global accounting Useful for accounting in jurisdictions where access is prohibited or not regulated, and where cross-jurisdiction regulations do not exist. That enables a couple of useful products, but I'll save that for a different cast. Potential obsoleter: AGI, which potentially enables subjective consensus, which will replace strict consensus Caveat: Due to speculation being the dominant usecase for extralegal global accounting, there will be plenty of products deployed on public blockchains even if they are better suited to other P2P designs which are both more efficient and more decentralised.

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No idea what the context is, but it's pretty clear in the last few years the crypto industry has barrelled down the cascade of degeneracy. At this point, it's institutionalised and normalised, and even the biggest players are deep into the game. To be clear, I use "gambling" in the broader sense, and yes, we're obviously seeing the same in AI stocks, Gold etc. Some of it is real, sure. The TAM for gambling is 1,000x larger than building actual products in the short-medium term, so I don't blame anyone, especially respect those who are clear they just want to extract. It's all a shame because the few actual sustainable products are better than they have ever been, and if the crypto industry had gone down the productive path instead, I'd still be writing about those.

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