Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. I shared the below ideas in my keynote update on the market:Crypto is exiting what I would describe as a consolidation phase of the industry that has lasted the better part of the last 2 years. During this consolidation, there’s…Read More
The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionlessness, and a new glimmer of building a democratic/equitable internet on top of a shared world computer. Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the mainstream…Read More
“Only with crypto” has been facing headwinds (apart from SOV) while "better with crypto” has been gaining steam. Will this change? If so, how?…Read More
My crypto journey started with a startup in 2014 (Mediachain)—we wanted to put all the world's media onchain. What we believed then, I still believe now: onchain media allows media to simultaneously be abundant, distributed everywhere—and also valuable, with attribution for creators, provenance for collectors, and programmability for…Read More
When a new go to market strategy becomes clear, a wave of innovation and opportunity often follows. In 2024, you can go to where the wallets are.…Read More
Crypto can be viewed as the “democratization of investing.” Robinhood did it for stocks. Crypto does it for many other forms of internet-native value: money, digital art, memes, and early-stage technology projects.…Read More
Library: a stateless code pattern/schema. The success of a library can be measured by the number of times it is copy/pasted, replicated, re-deployed, and custom tuned. This is the tested and true thing that open source does well. Examples: Linux, ERC721. But as the history of open source…Read More
I’m writing this post quickly for a more permanent record of developing thoughts. This style and many of the ideas were spurred by a few blog posts Wilson Cusack wrote last year, which I recently read and reference below. Highly recommend reading them too! In Wilson’s Fees for…Read More
I was struck by Matt Huang's "Web3 has done much damage" tweet, which disparages the term Web3 in favor of “crypto.” Crypto is a 100x better term than web3, always has beenWeb3 has caused much damage and misplaced expectations— Matt Huang (@matthuang) January 9, 2023 "Crypto" has its roots…Read More
In 2006, Paul Graham wrote a great post wherein he concluded that Web 2.0 was a credible term because it meant “using the web the way it's meant to be used.” I think this is a good lens to interpret the term Web3, and why it is still a…Read More