Today is a pivotal and dangerous moment for crypto. In my twelve years in this space, I have never seen the conditions we’re experiencing now, even in our most bearish cycles.
Individually, these signals would be disconcerting. Together, they are signs of a major potential crisis. Whatever happened to calls for utility or onboarding the next billion?
The first major concern is that fewer and fewer builders are looking for smart contract audits, which has come up time and time again in my conversations with the auditing companies (and evidenced by Yearn’s recent smart contract exploit). This is a typical standard procedure before any decentralized application (dApp) launches. It isn’t because they are happy to launch without it: it’s because the new dApps don’t exist. Builders — developers, founders wanting to launch apps that people want to use — are either waiting for the environment to improve or leaving crypto. They’re not interested in building what are, frankly, easy applications or in simply replicating what already exists — like financial applications, tokenized funds, etc.
Second, there’s very little encouragement, support, or funding from investors for the utility applications which are much harder to build and (usually) take more time. Unless an app has the potential for a 1000x return in a short time window in some kind of DeFi scheme, it just won’t get funded or get “supported,” which forces the builders into a corner. In other words: if you’re a blockchain-savvy founder with a great idea, you may find yourself in an impossible position from the start.
Instead, the investments in our space are currently focused on pure short-term profit chasing, such as memecoins, insider knowledge manipulation, multi-layer DeFi protocols without enough transparency, and over-leveraged trading. And where money goes, attention goes, which is why we’re hearing less and less about blockchain-based products or use cases. Instead, we’re overwhelmed with headlines and podcast episodes about ETF inflows/outflows, DAT performances, trading tips, etc. This only serves to further trick and confuse retail investors who are buying into these delusions, which are not made for amateurs, without understanding the devious behavior happening behind the scenes.
Worst of all, this focus on profit-chasing above true blockchain-based use cases is being perpetuated by many of our industry “leaders.” They could be pushing for the entire global monetary system to be migrated on-chain for increased efficiency and transparency, or the use of blockchain and crypto to actually improve our societies, like incentivizing sustainable actions or healthier behaviors. But instead, they’re embracing (and platforming) a new, more dangerous breed of middleman.
It is these middlemen and their financial products that have introduced harmful and intentional complexity and obfuscation to our previously transparent markets. And in doing so, they have unlocked an unbelievable new level of greed and theft.
Consider the recent October 11th liquidation — we still don’t know the full impact of what happened, except that retail investors are still paying the price while the people with power negotiate their own recoveries.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain were invented to exterminate financial oligopolies and democratize access to a new era of the internet. Instead, we’ve allowed the reinvention of the manipulative middlemen and welcomed them right back in with a little change of form as the potential ‘saviors’ of Web3.
Web3 got its name because blockchain is truly the next generation of the Internet. Looking at the fundamentals of the technology itself, blockchain sits as the crown jewel of the technological evolution of humankind. Used correctly, AI will make us more productive, and blockchain will improve the relationships of how different parties work without barriers. Together, they could reshape the world as much or more than the internet did.
But instead, we’re stuck watching DATs, ETFs, trading leverages, and DeFi liquidations, and a small number of people make outsized profits on the misery and loss of millions of others. Crypto has not yet fulfilled its promise of matching the radical transformation of the World Wide Web, with decentralized principles at its core.
As I’ve watched these months go by, I keep being reminded of a scene from the movie The Big Short. Investor Mark Baum, increasingly frustrated at the irrational and greedy behavior of the market (and the players within it), says: “What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once.”
He’s right. Every single cent of profit gained from squeezing the crypto ecosystem only drives builders away and halts the progress of this amazing technology. In exchange for the chance at a short-term profit, these crypto middlemen are destroying the value of the underlying asset they’re speculating on. But everyone in the industry will ultimately pay for that, including those who love this technology and believe in its potential.
For those of us who want to use crypto to make the world better, we need to start calling out this behavior for what it is: short-sighted, selfish, unwelcome greed. We need to do something to save our beloved industry to focus on more real utility building and put it into the attention center building innovative applications for the next billion users, and the projects and protocols that deliver on the undeniable potential of Web3.
Let’s all take up the fight for utility, while there is still fight left in us.
