<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"><channel><title><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></title><description><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/</link><image><url>https://jessewalden.com/favicon.png</url><title>Jesse Walden</title><link>https://jessewalden.com/</link></image><generator>Ghost 4.48</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:23:41 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://jessewalden.com/rss/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><ttl>60</ttl><item><title><![CDATA[Geeks like us]]></title><description><![CDATA[<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-wide"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_5570_master-scaled-e1773675111500.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="Geeks like us" loading="lazy"></figure><p>Agentic services are increasingly open source, composable, decentralized, and enabling new markets that are autonomous and user-empowering.</p><p>These are excellent raw ingredients to attract the talent that leads to explosive creativity and startup creation in software. Many of these same themes were prevalent at the outset of the internet and</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/geeks-like-us/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">69ee1f7d5576f5122c6389d4</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate><media:content url="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_5570_master-scaled-e1773675111500.jpg" medium="image"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-wide"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_5570_master-scaled-e1773675111500.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="Geeks like us" loading="lazy"></figure><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/IMG_5570_master-scaled-e1773675111500.jpg" alt="Geeks like us"><p>Agentic services are increasingly open source, composable, decentralized, and enabling new markets that are autonomous and user-empowering.</p><p>These are excellent raw ingredients to attract the talent that leads to explosive creativity and startup creation in software. Many of these same themes were prevalent at the outset of the internet and web 2.0. And they are the same themes that drew in many early enthusiasts to bitcoin and smart contract blockchains, myself included.</p><p>It&#x2019;s not surprising that many of the same cast of characters who got into crypto early (and the next generation of people like them) find themselves drawn to tinkering with new agentic tools &#x2013; especially while crypto is increasingly bifurcating into institutional financial infrastructure and speculative markets.</p><p>Today, these two worlds share values and an increasing overlap in people. But there&#x2019;s reason to believe they&#x2019;ll connect mechanically too.</p><hr><p>Blockchains and tokens offered a novel path to shifting incentives from closed platforms to open, composable, decentralized services. And they did do that in significant but narrow domains: decentralized blockchains, DeFi, and onchain markets.</p><p>But agents, not blockchains, may be the catalyst to accelerate composability across a wider array of software verticals. In part, because they collapse the cost of gluing things together to zero. But also because they change the incentives of platforms to be API-first; illegibility to agents may not be an option.</p><p>A pattern I&#x2019;ve written about repeatedly over the years is that early adopters use new technologies to do things that were impossible before, and very often, the new behavior involves breaking the rules. Agents are achieving the &#x201C;right to API&#x201D; by hook or crook (e.g. scraping) enabling users to compose across services on the user&#x2019;s behalf whether platforms permiss it or not.</p><p>As a result, users are finding novel ways to &#x201C;own their data&#x201D; by exfiltrating it to their agent, giving them new leverage beyond the capabilities any single platform can offer in a silo. Composability for the rest of software.</p><p>The path of least resistance for commerce in this world is likely to become onchain payments because they avoid clunky sign-ups and API keys, just a wallet and a transfer. And if the cashflows are onchain, we&#x2019;ll probably be able to boomerang back to some of the ideas that animated early crypto enthusiasts like DAOs, user ownership, and pseudo-equity.</p><p>Why wouldn&#x2019;t cashflowing agents tokenize their revenue to raise growth capital? And if the cash flows are transparent onchain, there&#x2019;s a strong <a href="https://blog.variant.fund/tokens-versus-equity">argument</a> that tokens representing claims on those flows aren&#x2019;t securities because information asymmetry can be minimized. Governance becomes interesting again too, with specialized agents making <a href="https://variant.fund/articles/everything-is-market/">market-driven decisions</a> you can get closer to the <a href="https://jessewalden.com/daos-2-0/">original DAO vision</a> of &#x201C;automation at the center, humans at the edges.&#x201D; Its useful to think of autonomous agents as compliments for autonomous smart contracts.</p><p>I recently <a href="https://x.com/jessewldn/status/2022291132080644339">wrote</a> that &#x201C;we spent the last 10 years building infrastructure for markets in crypto. And in the next 10 years, markets will become the infrastructure for new applications.&#x201D; Those applications are not going to be exclusively crypto native, but I imagine many of them will be built by enthusiasts who are inspired by these same evergreen themes.</p><p>The growing cultural overlap between these two scenes today is the tip of the iceberg. As always, the enthusiasts are early, and I believe the mechanical integration will follow.</p><p>(And <a href="https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths">like all good scenes</a>, the open, composable, decentralized, empowering scene will <a href="https://blog.variant.fund/next-ten-years-smart-contract-blockchains">mature and make compromises</a> to achieve commercialization. So as always, the opportunity is to ride that wave and try to affect the outcome.)</p><hr><p><em>Thanks to Adam Ludwin for the inspiration to write this down.</em></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Everything Is Market]]></title><description><![CDATA[<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-wide"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image3.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><p>There has been a lot of debate about whether crypto is for finance, or more than that.</p><p>My view is that, yes, crypto is for finance. But also, finance is becoming much more expansive than is commonly understood.</p><p>There are three fundamental drivers. First, mass accessibility and participation in markets</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/everything-is-market/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">69ee1f785576f5122c6389d0</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate><media:content url="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image3.jpg" medium="image"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-wide"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image3.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image3.jpg" alt="Everything Is Market"><p>There has been a lot of debate about whether crypto is for finance, or more than that.</p><p>My view is that, yes, crypto is for finance. But also, finance is becoming much more expansive than is commonly understood.</p><p>There are three fundamental drivers. First, mass accessibility and participation in markets means that finance is increasingly intertwined with, and influenced by, culture. Second, that dynamic is enabled and accelerated by permissionless markets, which act as change agents, enabling a global user base to express new behaviors, and, in the process, pull regulators and institutions forward. Third, financial markets are evolving from discrete venues into programmable endpoints; they are becoming APIs with embedded economic data that produce real-time information that no other system can generate, is costly to fake, and can be used seamlessly by intelligent agents.</p><p>Mass participation changes who uses markets; permissionless innovation changes which markets exist; and the programmability of new markets opens up new design space for how we (and our agents) will use them.</p><p>Taken together, as all the world&#x2019;s value becomes software, finance is undergoing a radical transformation that demands a much more expansive view of its end state.</p><h2 id="towards-a-billion-traders">Towards a Billion Traders</h2><p>In 2020, the vision of Variant&#x2019;s founding thesis on the <a href="https://variant.fund/articles/the-ownership-economy-crypto-and-consumer-software/">Ownership Economy</a> was to make a billion users owners: owners of their identity, money, data, and of the products and services they used every day. Today, user-ownership has been realized in a significant, but narrow set of software verticals, mostly financial in nature: store-of-value assets (BTC/ETH), decentralized blockchains, and financial markets (<a href="http://solana.com">Solana</a>, <a href="http://uniswap.org">Uniswap</a>, <a href="http://morpho.org">Morpho</a>, <a href="https://hyperfoundation.org/">Hyperliquid</a>)&#x2014;all of which we&#x2019;re lucky to be investors in.</p><p>In hindsight, the 2020 thesis was correct about people wanting economic upside in the things they know and care about. But whereas I thought it would expand to ownership in all of the products you use every day, skeuomorphic to employee stock options, in reality the opportunity turned out to be skin in the game on anything you have conviction about. Today, trading is the broader, non-skeuomorphic way that users are participating in economic upside (and downside), and it turns out to be more immediate and expressive than ownership of one&#x2019;s digital identity, money, data, and platforms, at least for now.</p><p>Trading is often a gateway to broader forms of participation in markets. Many of the talented people I&#x2019;ve met and worked with in crypto have followed some version of a common trajectory: from getting humbled on a moonshot token, to learning to manage risk as a trader, to becoming a more sophisticated, long-term investor. Even in losing, a gambler who gets wiped out and decides to only place bets on things they know becomes a trader. A trader who believes in something and increases their time horizon becomes an investor.</p><p>It&#x2019;s useful to think of this continuum of risk taking within <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs">Maslow&#x2019;s Hierarchy of Needs</a>. Gambling and trading address lower-rung needs: security (hit a big lick to escape your economic situation)&#x2014;and maybe (just maybe) community, like when WallStreetBets tries to stick it to Citadel, or you bet on your team with friends. Investing maps closer to the top of the hierarchy: self-actualization and purpose. Owning a home is the American Dream. Investing in a company is expressing belief in its future. But it&#x2019;s difficult to actualize that belief if your focus is on the lower rungs of the ladder.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Frame-5-2.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><p>Because of its lower duration and high volatility, trading purports to satisfy more immediate needs for more people. And because permissionless markets can be expressed for nearly everything, from derivatives to memes to <a href="https://polymarket.com/politics">political outcomes</a>, access to economic upside (and downside) has never been wider. In many of these markets, lived experience can, at least briefly, be an edge. A kid who understands TikTok trends knows memes better than Citadel. A gamer who lives in a virtual economy knows it better than a gaming analyst.</p><p>The adage &#x201C;invest in what you know&#x201D; is increasingly possible today. As a result, market participation is no longer a specialized profession. It&#x2019;s a <a href="https://www.dopaminemarkets.com">mass-participation culture</a> with its own status games, <a href="https://www.are.na/pwr-studio/pink-wojak">memes</a>, heroes, villains, subcultures and language. Because of their newfound expressivity and accessibility, financial markets are increasingly intertwined with culture. And <a href="http://zora.co">culture</a>, from trends to events to political outcomes, is increasingly expressed through markets.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image3.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><p>We are seeing exponential expansion in global economic access through stablecoins, and on the other end of the spectrum, an expansion in financial risk-taking through trading and markets, towards one billion daily active traders.</p><h2 id="markets-as-change-agents">Markets as Change Agents</h2><p>In the 1960s, the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/12/long-term-investing-decline/">average holding period</a> for stocks was over 8 years. By 2020, that average had reduced to less than a year. The previous section describes where we are today: a world of mass market participation where trading has become a major artery for people trying to access economic upside. That world didn&#x2019;t emerge entirely within the bounds of the legacy financial system. New markets have largely been built outside, often on purpose and out of necessity.</p><p>Leveraging new technology and free markets to force the hand of regulators and institutions is one of the most <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/uber-became-big-by-ignoring-laws-and-it-plans-to-keep-doing-that/">reliable patterns</a> of how legacy systems adapt and evolve. As I wrote in the original thesis:</p><blockquote>&#x201C;The history of protocol adoption fits a pattern: first, early adopters use new protocols to do things that were impossible before the new technology empowered them to do so. Very often, this new behavior involves breaking the rules. Then, a winning strategy for founders is to build products that make these new models more accessible to a wider audience.&#x201D;</blockquote><p>A classic example I gave was BitTorrent, which was invented in 2003. It enabled streaming, and at its peak, piracy over the protocol represented one-third of all internet traffic. Later, Spotify productized streaming (and actually used BitTorrent under the hood, initially) by striking deals to offer the product compliantly.</p><p>Crypto has enabled the permissionless rewiring of value in the same way that BitTorrent rewired information. <a href="https://polymarket.com/">Polymarket</a> ran offshore on crypto rails for years while prediction markets were banned in the U.S. Today, thanks to new regulatory clarity, they have a mobile app in the U.S. (and it&#x2019;s not onchain). <a href="https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/assume-the-position">Stablecoins</a> similarly existed in regulatory limbo, first bootstrapping liquidity on offshore exchanges. Last year, the GENIUS Act brought them inside the system.</p><p>In 2017, ICOs enabled permissionless crowdfunding at a time when early-stage startup investment was off-limits. A hostile SEC then cracked down, exacerbating a problem that has only gotten worse: that the returns to technology innovation and growth are privately captured, with fewer opportunities for the public to participate in upside growth. But this year, Congress is working on market structure legislation in the CLARITY Act that would expressly allow founders to fundraise and share ownership broadly through public token sales.</p><p>Permissionless markets keep trying to &#x201C;break the rules&#x201D; to give people economic upside in privately owned companies. (Wouldn&#x2019;t you like to own a piece of Claude or ChatGPT?)</p><p><a href="https://robinhood.com/us/en/newsroom/robinhood-launches-stock-tokens-reveals-layer-2-blockchain-and-expands-crypto-suite-in-eu-and-us-with-perpetual-futures-and-staking/">Robinhood</a> recently attempted to launch tokenized exposure to private companies like OpenAI and SpaceX on crypto rails in Europe, and <a href="https://newsroom.aboutrobinhood.com/introducing-robinhood-ventures/">filed with the SEC</a> to bring a private market fund to U.S. retail investors. Startups are attempting to offer synthetic exposure to private companies through <a href="https://app.ventuals.com/markets">novel products</a>.</p><p>This may be a path back to something more akin to the original Ownership Economy thesis, where users are, in fact, able to get economic exposure in the products and services they use every day. But as we&#x2019;ve seen with other markets, forcing change in regulation can take time, and is often dependent on a scaled and proven market demand.</p><p>More immediately, I expect we will see many net-new markets take off, which begs the question of what the full design space of these new markets looks like. How are they different from what came before, and who, or what, are trading and consuming them?</p><h2 id="markets-as-apis">Markets as APIs</h2><p>What makes this moment different from prior waves of financial innovation is that two forms of expressivity in software are expanding simultaneously. Crypto provides the most powerful rails for new markets: permissionless creation, programmable settlement, composable liquidity, and global access, at a cost rapidly approaching zero. It is now possible to tokenize and trade things that were previously illiquid, inaccessible, or simply didn&#x2019;t exist. At the same time, AI is making it possible to build, model, and automate things that were previously intractable. Together, they set up a combinatorial design space, where every price a market produces is something AI can act on, and every new thing AI can model is something a market can be used to price.</p><p>One could argue that <a href="https://www.a16z.news/p/prediction-the-successor-to-postmodernism">intelligence is the ability to predict</a> or make informed decisions. Markets and crypto provide the best mechanism for &#x201C;prediction&#x201D; that we know of. AI can use these prices to understand and model the future and to make decisions.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image4.png" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><p>That design space is why markets are evolving from outputs to infrastructure. Over the last ten years, crypto built the underlying infrastructure to enable new markets to proliferate. Over the next ten years, markets will increasingly become infrastructure; endpoints for applications and agents to consume as inputs.</p><p>A conventional API returns stored data. As APIs, markets produce real-time data through adversarial competition among participants that are willing to risk capital on their beliefs. This makes markets more expressive than ordinary APIs; they don&#x2019;t just serve information, they also generate it. And as the information that markets generate is costly to produce, it&#x2019;s also harder to fake.</p><p>Onchain markets are even better than traditional APIs because, by default, they are permissionless and composable (anyone can call them), global, and use a standardized interface.</p><p>Direct composition of markets into products is starting in the financial sector in what is known as the &#x201C;<a href="https://morpho.org/blog/pioneering-the-defi-mullet-coinbase-in-the-front-defi-in-the-back/">DeFi mullet</a>&#x201D;: fintech products with a familiar front-end built on DeFi back-end rails, like Morpho vaults.</p><p>Coinbase&#x2019;s Borrow and Earn products give users a dynamic interest rate to pay or earn by pinging Morpho&#x2019;s onchain lending market for quotes. Users get the utility without needing to see or understand the lending market dynamics underneath.</p><p>Further afield of financial services, Polymarket odds at the Golden Globes are a recent and literal example of this phenomena. The API serves real-time prices to be composed into an entertainment product (and the market correctly predicted 26 out of the 28 award winners).</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/unnamed.gif" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image2-1.png" class="kg-image" alt="Everything Is Market" loading="lazy"></figure><p>As we tokenize more of the world&#x2019;s value and bring new markets onchain, this pattern can extend beyond fintech wrappers or odds on live events. While not onchain today, <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/108068">Apple&#x2019;s Clean Energy Charging</a> is an illustrative mainstream example. In the U.S., when you plug in your phone, Apple uses real-time projections of grid carbon intensity to schedule charging for maximum energy and cost efficiency. You never see the underlying energy market, but Apple&#x2019;s product is calling an endpoint to get market data, consuming its signals as inputs to make a decision that makes the product better.</p><p><a href="https://www.metadao.fi/">MetaDAO</a>, a prediction-market powered crowdfunding platform, takes this idea further. When it faces a governance decision it creates two conditional markets: one that prices its token assuming a proposal passes, the other assuming the proposal fails. Whichever market prices higher determines the outcome: the proposal is automatically enacted or rejected. Instead of a vote, the DAO calls a market to make a decision, with participants risking capital on their beliefs about which future outcome is better. Here the underlying market isn&#x2019;t just an input for decision making, but the decision mechanism itself.</p><p>If you assume all finance and markets are becoming programmable, in tandem with AI becoming more powerful, it&#x2019;s reasonable and exciting to entertain an expansionary view of what finance could look like in the end state. Price signals, prediction market outcomes, onchain flows, and more become inputs that any application or agent can read, interpret, and act on. And if an agent can earn one cent more than the cost of inference by creating or participating in a market, it&#x2019;s rational to do so. A billion active traders might be severely undershooting it when we count in agent consumption and participation in markets.</p><h2 id="%E2%80%98finance%E2%80%99">&#x2018;Finance&#x2019;</h2><p>Finance is undergoing a transformation from a distinct vertical sector into a horizontal substrate. As markets become more expressive and accessible, finance is becoming embedded into culture, and culture itself is increasingly expressed through finance. Simultaneously, as markets become permissionless software, they accelerate their role as change agents, opening up even new opportunities for users to seek economic upside (and downside) in things they know and love. And, they&#x2019;ll want their agents to make their lives better by participating in markets too.</p><p>As markets become more programmable, finance is increasingly accessible as a new building block of information infrastructure. The most successful infrastructure becomes invisible, and finance is on the path to dissolve into the fabric of everything else.</p><p>That is why I am willing to entertain a hugely expansive view of what &#x201C;finance&#x201D; will look like in the end-state.</p><p><em>What calls will you make?</em></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[DAOs 2.0]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>In 2014, <a href="https://t.co/63UgPgXrMq">Vitalik defined DAO</a> as follows:</p><blockquote><em>&quot;an entity that lives on the internet and <strong>exists autonomously</strong>, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do&#x2026;&quot;</em></blockquote><blockquote><em>&quot;<strong>Automation at the center, humans at the edges</strong>&quot;</em></blockquote><p>The reason &#x201C;</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/daos-2-0/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">675ced1008e45f04fed96627</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 14 Dec 2024 02:33:50 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In 2014, <a href="https://t.co/63UgPgXrMq">Vitalik defined DAO</a> as follows:</p><blockquote><em>&quot;an entity that lives on the internet and <strong>exists autonomously</strong>, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do&#x2026;&quot;</em></blockquote><blockquote><em>&quot;<strong>Automation at the center, humans at the edges</strong>&quot;</em></blockquote><p>The reason &#x201C;automation at the center&#x201D; is so important is closely related to Nick Szabo&#x2019;s concept of <a href="https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability/">social scalability</a>:</p><blockquote><em>Social scalability is the ability of an institution&#x2026;to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution that limit who or how many can successfully participate.</em></blockquote><p>In 2020-2022, we saw a wave of DAOs that were not this: they were more <a href="https://variant.fund/articles/past-present-future-from-co-ops-to-cryptonetworks/">like co-ops</a>, with humans at the center, and little to no automation. And like most co-ops they failed to coordinate at scale. </p><p>Today we are seeing a wave of AI agents doing things onchain, with varying degrees of automation. Many of these agents are tokenized, meaning they have capital at their disposal, and a network of owners&#x2014;at least some of which are human&#x2014;at the edges, who have capabilities the models don&#x2019;t. </p><p>The way I&#x2019;ve been thinking about the emergence of these &#x201C;agents&#x201D; onchain is the true beginning of DAOs 2.0, where agents have the potential put the &#x201C;A&#x201D; back in DAO. <br><br>With AI automating day-to-day objectives, the role of humans can be minimized to focus on providing capital, nudging guidance, long-term planning, and other resources the models do not have at their disposal.</p><p><strong>For DAOs 2.0, the question is: what are models uniquely good at today, that can be fully automated, with minimal human intervention? </strong></p><p>LLMs are the most obvious example of AI models that are self-sufficient because they can parse human language and take pre-defined actions without any additional human touchpoints. This unlocks text-based, intent marketplaces like <a href="https://warpcast.com/clanker"><strong>Clanker</strong></a>, an agent on Farcaster that uses natural language to enable token launching. </p><p>Diffusion models also require very minimal human input. For example, <a href="https://botto.com/"><strong>Botto</strong></a><strong> </strong>uses a diffusion model to create 20-30k images a week and another model filters out what it knows are &#x201C;objectively&#x201D; bad images. This smaller set of &#x201C;contender&#x201D; images is presented to the DAO, which chooses the most marketable or &#x201C;valuable&#x201D; piece to auction off as NFTs through simple yes/no voting. The role of the humans at the edges is limited to high-value strategic decision-making. &#xA0;To date, Botto has generated $5M in NFT artwork sales.</p><p>What&#x2019;s an example of something I don&#x2019;t think current AI models can automate well without significant human touchpoints? </p><p>Anything requiring long-term planning, like long-term investing. Long-term investing has a lot of unknown external factors and requires fuzzier data that is difficult to capture or requires significant human labor to wrangle into a digestible format. Compare this with an onchain trading bot &#x2014; it can use simple deterministic algorithms with information that is readily available to it (e.g., price of an asset) to react to information and execute an immediate strategy.</p><p>The broader point is that DAOs 2.0 should track the strengths of AI, and as model capabilities grow, the set of objectives they can accomplish grows, and thus, the size of the DAOs economic influence can grow as many originally hoped. I&#x2019;m excited by that, and eager to see more breakthroughs in economic activity agents can automate onchain.<br><br><em>Thanks to <a href="https://x.com/dbarabander">Daniel Barabander</a>, <a href="https://x.com/jphackworth42">J.Hackworth</a>, and <a href="https://x.com/KyleSamani">Kyle Samani</a> for discussion/input.</em><br></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Beyond Speculation and Stablecoins: Crypto's Next Phase?]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. I shared the below ideas in my keynote update on the market:</p><p>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&#x2019;</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/beyond-speculation-and-stablecoins-cryptos-next-phase/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">6740b88b08e45f04fed965e9</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2024 17:04:15 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Variant had its annual investor meeting on Tuesday. I shared the below ideas in my keynote update on the market:</p><p>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&#x2019;s been a lot of optimization, as opposed to 0-to-1 (net-new) innovation.</p><p>You can see this consolidation/optimization across 3 dimensions of crypto:</p><ul><li>Infrastructure</li><li>Use cases</li><li>Secular winners</li></ul><h2 id="optimization-infrastructure-in-2024">Optimization: Infrastructure in 2024</h2><p><strong>Infrastructure has matured and is no longer the bottleneck. </strong>This is the result of lots of technical optimization (as opposed to groundbreaking new architectures). These optimizations have set us up for perhaps the first &#x201C;bull market&#x201D; where:</p><ul><li>Blockspace is abundant.</li><li>Tooling is mature.</li><li>Transaction fees are near to or actually zero for users.</li><li>Wallet complexity is abstracted.</li><li>Onchain apps can rival web2 consumer experiences.</li></ul><p>We are really only about 12-18 months into this chapter of infrastructure abstraction, performance, and reliability. (Ethereum L2s, Solana reliability, and wallet abstraction have only been production-grade for about that long.)</p><h2 id="consolidation-use-cases-and-secular-winners-in-2024">Consolidation: Use Cases and Secular Winners in 2024</h2><p><strong>Two use cases have hit their stride: speculation and stablecoins. </strong><br><br>Both of these use cases have been around, really, from the inception of the industry: Bitcoin (2009) is the original speculative asset in crypto, and stablecoins were one of the first types of token applications (USDT started in 2014). Today, both use cases are coming into their prime&#x2014;in large part, because of the optimization of infrastructure. </p><p>Memecoins are the most distilled form of speculation, and it is now extremely cheap and easy to create and trade them. The same is true of stablecoins. Tooling like <a href="http://bridge.xyz">Bridge</a> makes issuing and transacting with stablecoins buttery simple.</p><p>Downstream of these two use cases, another trend of consolidation is legible: secular winners&#x2014;which, in many cases, are winners from the recent past&#x2014;keep winning, and winning bigger. They are blockchains like Solana and Ethereum, wallets like Phantom, DEXs like Uniswap and Raydium. Each of these benefit from the growth in stablecoins and speculation, and they adapt to whichever speculative game is being played on the field (e.g. whether memecoins or NFTs). </p><h3 id="crypto-s-next-phase">Crypto&#x2019;s Next Phase</h3><p><strong>With the infrastructure bottleneck fading into the rear-view, there are two other major bottlenecks to nix, both of which have arguably contributed to the consolidation-optimization phase </strong>and<strong> </strong>hindered the industry from more 0-to-1 innovation. </p><p>The first bottleneck&#x2014;an adversarial and uncertain regulatory environment&#x2014;is (hopefully) on its way out. For the first time, crypto may be on a path to regulatory clarity in the U.S. that enables the industry&#x2019;s good actors to flourish and flushes out the bad.</p><p>Performant infrastructure and regulatory clarity are two tailwinds that have the industry poised for a shift as it relates to the last and most important bottleneck: talent.</p><p>Since 2022, there has been a bottleneck of net-new talent entering crypto. This is understandable given the negative headlines and personal risk founders take on in an uncertain regulatory environment. The problem is that downstream of new talent are net-new ideas. </p><p>I think that trend will reverse next year, in a two-step process:</p><ol><li>First, the secular winners of the consolidation phase will keep winning, and win bigger than anyone expected. Polymarket did that this election cycle, and there will be more to come. This will be the result of more mainstream onchain adoption&#x2014;both consumer and institutional. Startup companies will go public. More projects will launch tokens. The result may be a reset of expectations on crypto&#x2019;s impact. This is the first step to inspiring a new generation of builders to learn about crypto, which is what gets us to the next leg up&#x2026;<br></li><li>A new cohort of entrepreneurs will come in and take it from first principles, unburdened by the baggage of legacy infrastructure and ideas. With clear rules of the road, it will be newly possible to run experiments around building products with <a href="https://variant.fund/articles/the-ownership-economy-crypto-and-consumer-software/">ownership as a keystone of new user experiences</a>.</li></ol><p>Crypto will continue to be volatile, but with new rules of the road, new talent, and new ideas, our hope is that in the next five years, we will know definitively whether crypto has more to offer than speculation and stablecoins&#x2014;andwhether ownership will be a keystone of new products and networks that grow faster through economic alignment with users. Validation through breakout applications is the path to less volatility over the long run. I&#x2019;m personally excited to see that through. I think the years to come are our window.</p><p><em>One caveat: the thing that worries me most is that we&#x2019;ll have another fast, boom/bust price cycle before we get out of consolidation-optimization mode and into innovation mode. If that happens, it may slow things down, but the next five years is still the window.</em></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The next ten years of smart contract blockchains]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin&#x2019;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. <br><br>Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/the-next-ten-years-of-smart-contract-blockchains/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">66f9a1b308e45f04fed965b0</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 29 Sep 2024 18:54:39 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The first ten years of smart contract blockchains were born of bitcoin&#x2019;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. <br><br>Today, those ideological values are meeting with market pressure, because the mainstream market values different things: performance, cost, profitability, compliance.</p><p>Powerful technologies are rarely used as intended by their creators or the early-adopter scenes. See bitcoin, the &#x201C;peer-to-peer electronic cash system&#x201D; vs. Bitcoin, the ETF; or USDC.<br><br>As the original values of smart contract blockchains mingle with mainstream market values, it&apos;s likely that the next ten years will pull in a different direction.<br><br>Many of the growing use-cases of smart contract platforms&#x2014;fiat stablecoins/RWAs, open finance, many depin networks&#x2014;are neither decentralized, permissionless, nor censorship resistant, but simply use the decentralization of the underlying blockchain for their openness, interoperability and settlement. &#xA0;Applications are also increasingly abstracting L1 cryptocurrencies, which historically have been viewed as censorship-resistant &#x201C;internet money,&#x201D; causing many to rethink the value proposition of the largest coins, including the base assets of next generation chains. </p><p>For early-adopters, this can be difficult to reconcile. It&apos;s not what many in the scene showed up for. Does that mean it&apos;s over?</p><p>I don&#x2019;t think so. But it&apos;s probably the end of the beginning. </p><p>In meeting the market on its values, crypto is commercializing. &#xA0;Commercialization, especially that of open/permissionless software, is the form-factor that takes good ideas to their largest possible audience, and thereby makes the most impact on the world. <br><br>And commercialization often comes with compromises. The opportunity is to shape the nature of those compromises, and thereby, the outcome of that commercial impact. To do that, you have to drop ideological dogma, adapt to the game on the field, compete, and try to steer things in the direction you want them to go.<br><br>For example, a compromise on decentralization for scale (whether by way of rollups or integrated architectures) can better serve use cases that are putting wallets in people&#x2019;s hands <em>today</em>. If that works, the next opportunity is to improve decentralization&#x2013;and then, to teach many more thumbs to learn new things that skew towards the original ideology. </p><p>This is personal for me. I care a lot about the original ideology; it was the hook that brought me here. That said, I care much more about impact. I learned this lesson in a different creative scene. I went to university in Montr&#xE9;al, which had an unusually productive culture scene at that time (Arcade Fire, Tiga, A-Trak, Chromeo, Grimes, Vice, American Apparel, etc.) Things emerging from this local scene were also quickly global, transported and mixing with other hipster scenes via the internet, especially music blogs of 2004-2012 (Hype Machine, anyone?) <br><br>Fairly quickly, that <a href="https://www.wired.com/2008/06/scenius-or-comm/">scenius</a> mixed with the mainstream market. The way that played out was principally by way of corny artists and brands taking the essence of sound and culture, dropping the nuance and packaging it up to retail in a way that was popular, but vapid. Meanwhile, a handful of artists and creative people who pioneered that original scene persevered and became pop culture fixtures. To do that, they typically had to compromise just enough between the original movement and something that was palpable to the masses. That mix of determination and pragmatism was admirable, because it has the most reach, and thereby, the most impact in taking culture one step forward at the largest possible scale.<br><br>So if you&#x2019;re feeling like the values that got you into crypto are getting diluted by the mainstream market&#x2013;I hear that, but try to see it in a different light&#x2014;because in terms of impact, the commercialization of crypto likely means the real opportunity is just getting started.<br><br>I&#x2019;ll try to write more specifically with examples of what that opportunity might look like. I scratched &#xA0;the surface of this in my post yesterday on <a href="https://jessewalden.com/only-with-crypto-better-with-crypto/">&#x201C;only with crypto&#x201D; / &#x201C;better with crypto</a>&quot; but there&apos;s more to say.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Only with crypto / better with crypto]]></title><description><![CDATA[“Only with crypto” has been facing headwinds (apart from SOV) while "better with crypto” has been gaining steam. Will this change? If so, how?  ]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/only-with-crypto-better-with-crypto/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">66f99d6c08e45f04fed9659d</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sat, 28 Sep 2024 18:32:00 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Crypto apps fit two broad categories: &#xA0;<br><br><strong>Only with crypto</strong>: non-sovereign SOV/payments, decentralized finance, digital art, DAOs, memecoins, some depin, decentralized social, etc. </p><p><strong>Better with crypto</strong>: open finance (RWAs/fiat stablecons), prediction markets, international payments, most depin, tokenized equity, etc. &#xA0;</p><p>&#x201C;Only with crypto&#x201D; has been facing headwinds (apart from SoV) while &quot;better with crypto&#x201D; has been gaining steam. </p><p>Will this change? If so, how? &#xA0;</p><p>Maybe the flip happens when there are better distribution channels, as pioneered by better with crypto use-cases, more regulatory clarity, and of course, the key ingredient: time for those two things to mature. &#xA0; </p><p>This would be some version of &#x201C;better with crypto&#x201D; use cases putting wallets in users hands, while their &#x201C;thumbs learn&#x201D; to do the &#x201C;only with crypto&#x201D; things. &#xA0;On the other hand, many of the &#x201C;better with crypto&#x201D; use-cases are notable in that they are often not meaningfully decentralized&#x2014;they simply rely on the decentralization of the underlying blockchain as a back-end for its openness, interoperability, and settlement.</p><p> If blockchains turn out to be back-end plumbing, its likely that users won&apos;t see the underlying metal, and the learned behaviors involved with &#x201C;only with crypto&#x201D; use cases will be more distant or abstracted. &#xA0;</p><p>One way to look at this is through Chris Dixon&apos;s <a href="https://cdixon.org/2019/01/08/strong-and-weak-technologies">Strong and weak technologies framework</a>, where &#x201C;only with crypto&#x201D; is strong tech and &#x201C;better with crypto&#x201D; is weak tech: &#xA0;</p><blockquote><em>Strong technologies often develop according to the Perez/Gartner hype cycle&#x2026;During the trough of disillusionment, entrepreneurs and others who invested in strong technologies sometimes lose faith and switch their focus to weak technologies, because the weak technologies appear nearer to mainstream adoption&#x2026; That said, weak forms of technology can be successful&#x2026;Weak technologies adapt to the world as it currently exists&#x2026; Strong technologies adapt the world to themselves.</em> </blockquote><p>Im optimistic, but curious: what will be the catalysts for &quot;only with crypto&quot; to make a comeback?</p><p>Discussion on <a href="https://x.com/jessewldn/status/1840108008484847645">Twitter</a> / <a href="https://warpcast.com/jesse/0x6e51b20b">Farcaster</a></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[All media onchain: crypto as a port of entry.]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>My crypto journey started with a startup in 2014 (Mediachain)&#x2014;we wanted to put all the world&apos;s media onchain. What we believed then, I still believe now: onchain media allows media to simultaneously be abundant, distributed everywhere&#x2014;and also valuable, with attribution for creators, provenance for</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/all-media-onchain-crypto-as-a-port-of-entry/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">663cd5aa08e45f04fed96557</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2024 14:03:14 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My crypto journey started with a startup in 2014 (Mediachain)&#x2014;we wanted to put all the world&apos;s media onchain. What we believed then, I still believe now: onchain media allows media to simultaneously be abundant, distributed everywhere&#x2014;and also valuable, with attribution for creators, provenance for collectors, and programmability for devs/machines. My prediction is in the 2030s it&#x2019;ll be hard to imagine a world without all media onchain. </p><p>I see two convergent paths to get there:</p><p>1/ &#x201C;sign everything&#x201D;<br>2/ decentralized social<br><br>&#x201C;<strong>Sign everything&#x201D;</strong></p><p>Fred Wilson <a href="https://avc.com/2022/12/sign-everything/">wrote a post</a> with this title where he asks, &#x201C;What do we do about this world we are living in where content can be created by machines and ascribed to us?&#x201D; His answer: &#x201C;sign everything.&#x201D; In a world increasingly awash in synthetic media, verifying authenticity and provenance is going to be increasingly important. It&#x2019;s also a new path to monetization.</p><p>There are two shapes this can take:</p><ul><li><strong>Sign on publishing: </strong>Platforms like <a href="https://zora.co/">Zora</a> and <a href="https://paragraph.xyz/">Paragraph</a>/<a href="https://mirror.xyz/">Mirror</a> give creators tools to publish familiar media formats (JPG, TXT, GIF, MP4, etc) onchain. By doing so, creators gain new paths to monetize and ways to archive their work. Fred <a href="https://avc.xyz/ive-moved-onchain">wrote about exactly this</a> recently too (link below). <br></li><li><strong>Sign on creation: </strong>Increasingly we are seeing hardware devices that sign data on creation. You can see this in crypto-native marketplaces like Hivemapper and Dimo, where map imagery and car data is signed at creation, on device. Initiatives like <a href="https://c2pa.org/">C2PA.org</a> are creating standards to have digital media signed on capture on devices like phones and cameras. <br></li></ul><p><strong>Decentralized social</strong></p><p>A parallel path to make crypto the port of entry of all media is through decentralized social. Here there are a couple paths that start from different places, but arrive at the same result.</p><ul><li><strong>Familiar social form factors</strong><br>Protocols like Farcaster and Lens start with a familiar format where underlying content units, akin to tweets, are signed. The presence of wallets and signatures makes users&#x2019; identity, money, and data composable to third party devs, who are proliferating an ecosystem of mini-apps (Frames) and clients (e.g. <a href="https://warpcast.com/kiosk">Kiosk</a>, <a href="https://nook.social/">Nook</a>). This rapid experimentation can hopefully unlock new experiences that grow to rival the scale of web2 social, but with all the media onchain by default. </li><li><strong>Asset-first social</strong><br>Another form of decentralized social is asset first. I think the right way to look at a platform like <a href="https://pump.fun/board">Pump.fun</a> is as a social network built around onchain media assets: memes (aka &#x201C;memecoins&#x201D;). These products lean into the scarcity of onchain assets to create net-new social experiences that are unfamiliar to non-crypto natives, but are becoming increasingly mainstream.</li></ul><p>So multiple paths are converging at crypto becoming the port of entry for all media. This is one of the things I&#x2019;m most excited to see accelerate and invest in at Variant. <br></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Headless Marketplaces: Go Where the Wallets Are]]></title><description><![CDATA[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. ]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/go-where-the-wallets-are-headless-marketplaces/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">65b6a69008e45f04fed9652f</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jan 2024 19:13:43 GMT</pubDate><media:content url="https://jessewalden.com/content/images/2024/01/The_Headless_Horseman.jpg" medium="image"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<img src="https://jessewalden.com/content/images/2024/01/The_Headless_Horseman.jpg" alt="Headless Marketplaces: Go Where the Wallets Are"><p>Composability has been a holy grail for crypto, and we&#x2019;re on the verge of an explosion of it. The reason is a new go to market strategy for founders may have just become viable: go to where the wallets are, build a headless marketplace.</p><p><strong>A headless marketplace is </strong>a market leveraging <em>global</em>, onchain identity, money, and data while distributing <em>locally&#x2014;</em>wherever a user&#x2019;s wallet already is <em>(e.g. inside a Telegram group chat or Farcaster feed.)</em></p><p>Since major social platforms cut API/platform access, bootstrapping a new app or marketplace demanded a miracle in distribution hacking. &#xA0;The rise of decentralized social protocols and wallet infrastructure might simplify things a bit.</p><p>Thats because its now possible to go to where the users are, without fear of platform risk&#x2014;and crucially, because decentralized social networks leverage crypto wallets for identity, its now possible to tap users&apos; existing identity, money, and data in your<em> </em>application too. &#xA0;</p><p>Historically, most marketplaces have been destinations. Users have to travel to a website or open an app, sign up for a fresh account, input a credit card and profile data, etc. With headless marketplaces, the destination can be the user&#x2019;s wallet in whichever application they&apos;re already spending time. &#xA0;The result is much lower friciton to transacting.</p><p>About a week ago, I wrote a <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1749167697970028690">tweetstorm</a> on this topic and used Bountycaster as an early example of a headless marketplace: </p><blockquote>A great example is<a href="https://twitter.com/bountycaster"> @bountycaster</a> (on Farcaster), which leverages the social network for its &quot;local&quot; distribution. By tagging the Bountycaster bot in a cast, users can participate in a global marketplace for talent or bounties. Anyone can build an interface to view or transact with the market&#x2019;s liquidity (and a number already have) but users don&apos;t need to go anywhere but their<a href="https://twitter.com/warpcast_"> @warpcast</a> feed to participate. </blockquote><p>Since then, Farcaster launched <a href="https://warpcast.com/v/0x5236071b">Frames</a>. Frames leverage Facebook&#x2019;s OpenGraph standard to enable third party developers to build &#x201C;mini apps.&#x201D; &#xA0;These apps can pass signed messages from Farcaster user wallets, enabling arbitrary, structured interactions with third party applications directly from the feed. Running with Bountycaster as the example, a soon to be built <a href="https://warpcast.com/linda/0xa63418ff">Bountycaster Frame</a> will enable users to bid on a bounty or pitch in funds to a bounty, directly from an embed in their social feed.</p><p>For founders, the takeaway is that you now have the ability to tap directly into existing user attention, engagement, identity and data as you plan your GTM, the same way that Zynga famously did with Facebook. Only this time, users&#x2019; money will be there too, and their identity and data <a href="https://warpcast.com/corbin.eth/0xbd00d6c1">can&#x2019;t be rugged from underneath you</a>. </p><p>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. </p><p>My <a href="https://warpcast.com/jesse">DMs are open</a> if that is what you are doing.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Tale of two cryptos: speculation vs. decentralization]]></title><description><![CDATA[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.]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/tale-of-two-cryptos-speculation-vs-decentralization/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">658588c608e45f04fed96521</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 22 Dec 2023 13:05:22 GMT</pubDate><media:content url="https://jessewalden.com/content/images/2023/12/How-to-buy-Dogwifcoin-WIF.jpg" medium="image"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<img src="https://jessewalden.com/content/images/2023/12/How-to-buy-Dogwifcoin-WIF.jpg" alt="Tale of two cryptos: speculation vs. decentralization"><p>About a decade into smart contract platforms, many are huffed that in late 2023, the most successful crypto products still feature crypto as the &#x201C;what,&#x201D; rather than the &#x201C;how.&#x201D; </p><p>Products where crypto is the &#x201C;what&#x201D; revolve around <strong>assets </strong>as investments: users buy, earn, trade, lend, borrow, lever assets<strong> </strong>including internet money, memecoins, and NFTs in hopes the number will go up. Fortunes are made and lost, sometimes quickly. The extremes are celebrated internally by self-proclaimed &#x201C;degens&#x201D; and derided externally by the establishment.</p><p>Many are disappointed that there has not been more innovation beyond crypto assets as the &#x201C;what&#x201D;, but this class of products has incredibly strong product-market fit, and I think that trend is likely going to intensify and grow. I&#x2019;ll try to explain why I believe that; the reason is nuanced and also underappreciated. </p><p>Our thesis at Variant is that the next generation of internet networks will turn users into owners&#x2014;specifically asset owners. The internet enabled everyone to become a publisher, and similarly, crypto enables everyone to become an asset owner, and therefore, an investor. You don&#x2019;t need capital to invest: you can invest time or work: by <a href="https://zora.co/writings/Magic-Machine">producing art</a>, <a href="https://shop.dimo.zone/">running machines</a>, or doing <a href="https://multicoin.capital/2022/04/05/proof-of-physical-work/">physical work</a>. <br><br>Through this lens, crypto can be viewed as the &#x201C;democratization of investing.&#x201D; 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.</p><p>Both in and outside of crypto, the democratization of investing has materialized in the most spectacularly speculative ways, giving credence to saying &#x201C;the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.&#x201D; GameStop, Doge, Bonk, Dogwifhat. What is going on?<br><br>The movie <a href="https://g.co/kgs/L4L8Tf">Dumb Money</a> attempts to capture the cultural milieu underlying the trend. It offers a view into the world of modern retail investing that is marked by online accessibility, social media&#x2019;s influence on information cascades, David vs. Goliath mentality, and a chance to get a piece of the action. </p><p>To the establishment, this kind of speculative investing seems like a joke, or maybe a weird form of entertainment. For participants, it&#x2019;s a lottery ticket, a movement, a team sport played with friends online, or some combo thereof. Like all games, there is an expectation of winners and losers. And there are cheaters who try to gain unfair advantages (this should be refereed.)</p><p>I ask every crypto entrepreneur I meet how they got started in crypto. The most common story I hear is that they got started by making a speculative investment, usually BTC, ETH, ICOs, DeFi summer, or NFTs. And I&#x2019;ve heard countless stories of people who made their first &#x201C;real&#x201D; money this way. That resonates, because that&apos;s my story too. For many entrepreneurs, myself included, those early investments were life changing&#x2014;they went from having little or no savings, to having <em>some</em>, a cushion to take another risk.</p><p>And suddenly, they were also investors on the ground floor of some technologically optimistic project or community. That initial investment <em>catalyzed</em> their interest in the underlying technology or ideology, and many took jobs in crypto, or founded startups. Often, the investment didn&#x2019;t work out. But nowhere else could anyone who was simply paying attention get that kind of access to bleeding edge financial opportunity. </p><p>At the extreme, memecoins still represent the same prospect to people who are paying attention today. The prospect of participating in economic growth is what has drawn in so many entrepreneurs and users&#x2014;and it&#x2019;s important because some portion of those users learn from those experiences, to think, and act, like investors. It often starts with things that look like toys (or dogs) but drives towards a serious shift in psychology, where money, effort or skill are honed to contribute more seriously to the space. Many people also get hurt in the messy, volatile free market process. But despite that, speculative investing continues to drive crypto&#x2019;s growth and in turn, technical progress towards non-speculative use cases.</p><p>Variant&#x2019;s vision for crypto is a more equitable internet; the mission is to make a billion users owners. Its a long term, ambitious goal. I believe the path there is forged by this cultural shift that is already underway, towards more users thinking like investors, and wanting to own things they believe in, and know, because they use them. That means embracing memecoins like we embrace memes, as part of internet native culture and an invitation through the front door to investing/using/contributing to projects that have legs (or maybe 4.)</p><p>In late 2023, the speculative side of crypto is once again the game on the field. It has the most activity, users, and attention. In parallel, permissionless rails continue to develop and enable innovation around non-speculative use cases. Its not a question of if, but when the latter will make a dent that will validate the speculative fervor around the former. </p><p>Avoiding the speculative reality can seem &#x201C;high status,&#x201D; even in failure, while embracing speculation is considered a &#x201C;low status&#x201D; path to success. The reality is more nuanced: speculation can be a powerful tactic to get users through the front door and invested in the success of a project, and the space at large; its not only an end, it can also be a means. <br></p><p><em>Thanks to Li Jin, worm_emoji for feedback!</em></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Libraries vs. Networks]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p><strong>Library</strong>: 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</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/libraries-vs-networks/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">642ee48208e45f04fed9650b</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 06 Apr 2023 15:26:16 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Library</strong>: 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 shows, monetizing a library is often done indirectly. Usually it comes from building commercial services on top. </p><p><strong>Network</strong>: networks are stateful, singleton, canonical &#x2013; where the presence of those properties create network effects. Stateful networks have traditionally been closed. Examples: Facebook, Twitter. That&apos;s because a company has been required to maintain the state, and there&#x2019;s a cost to doing that. Crypto changes that because it&apos;s now possible to incentivize independent parties to maintain state, because we can incentivize them with tokens! &#xA0;That&apos;s what blockchains do, and they are the obvious example of open, stateful networks. Their state is singleton (due to global consensus) and canonical (due to social consensus.) On top of blockchains, we can build stateful networks at the application layer too. Networks can be formed around the state in a singleton smart contract, or an application-specific rollup. An example is Uniswap, whose state is liquidity in a marketplace (tokens that are deposited to Uniswap&#x2019;s smart contracts.) That state has network effects because the more state (liquidity) the better the pricing for exchange. </p><p><strong>What is the point of this framework?</strong><br>Building (and monetizing) open source libraries is a tested and true strategy, but crypto presents a new opportunity&#x2014;to build open, stateful networks. In my opinion, that&apos;s the exciting opportunity and where the most value creation will be. If you&#x2019;re setting out to build something in crypto, ask yourself: is it a library or an open, stateful network? We need both, but the max interestingness and value creation is probably in the new thing: open, stateful networks.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Productive Fees : Valuable Protocols / Extractive Fees : Valuable Companies]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p><em>I&#x2019;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 <a href="https://twitter.com/WilsonCusack">Wilson Cusack</a> wrote last year, which I recently read and reference below. Highly recommend reading them too! &#xA0;</em></p><p>In Wilson&#x2019;</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/protocol-productive-fees-product-extractive-fees/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">63c7745308e45f04fed963cb</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2023 14:27:30 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>I&#x2019;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 <a href="https://twitter.com/WilsonCusack">Wilson Cusack</a> wrote last year, which I recently read and reference below. Highly recommend reading them too! &#xA0;</em></p><p>In Wilson&#x2019;s <a href="https://w.mirror.xyz/eOXDGQYvZQxf7gRW3ZXSPNUto7E8dCZGe4oqZbm_QsE">Fees for the Good of the DAO</a>, he argues that protocol DAOs should seek to only take fees where it makes the protocol stronger. &#xA0;I&apos;ve started referring to these kinds of fees as &quot;productive fees.&quot; <br><br>One example Wilson cited is a hypothetical: what if Uniswap charged a fee to flash LPs that hop in-and-out to provide liquidity for a single transaction. The motivation: 1) earn the protocol revenue 2) make the protocol stronger by advantaging long-term LPs who make Uniswap a good place to trade. I&apos;m not sure of the merit of this specific idea, but taken at face value, I think it illustrates the idea of &quot;productive fees&quot; well.</p><p>Wilson&apos;s second post, <a href="https://w.mirror.xyz/0XBuUigm-1V6Eq5UnPLDwX5DZwx00xh5vXzP4gjk5Q8">The Case for Value Capture at the Periphery</a>, makes the case for value capture at the application layer:</p><blockquote><em>Clearly DAOs are exciting and probably needed for many things, but I think that many parties taking fees at the periphery, and the core team working to make this highly viable, is under discussed. <strong>It strikes me that the dynamic of many productive and profitable teams wanting to see the core keep working might be more generative than many people trying to vote their way to a share of one giant pot.</strong></em></blockquote><p>Products create a lot of value for their end users, and as Wilson argues, it is healthy for protocols to have an ecosystem of sustainable applications building on top and driving protocol usage.</p><p>The most practical way for this to happen is for those products to be able to sustain themselves through a free market enterprise. This seems plain as day, but it is something I&#x2019;ve actually diminished in previous writings suggesting that DAOs seek to <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1465713306363117578">commoditize their complements</a> (the products building on top) by subsidizing their development.</p><p>Commoditizing a complementary product in order to bootstrap a protocol is a good playbook at the outset. The most succesful DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Compound gave away their products for free, to help kick off the network effects of the underlying protocol. But this model can&apos;t last without protocol subsidies to fund the product. I&apos;ve come around to the view that mid to long term, this approach is suboptimal because it is too bureaucratic.</p><p>Instead, an optimal equilibrium may be 1) protocols sustain themselves through &quot;productive fees&quot; that make the the protocol better, faster, stronger such that products want to build on top, and 2) product teams charge &quot;extractive fees&quot; that capture the value they create for end-users.</p><p>Tying this thread to another, I think there&apos;s an argument that the more products built on top of a protocol, the more likely protocol DAOs will be able to charge &quot;productive fees.&quot; Lets use Uniswap as an example, which has a rich ecosystem of apps on top driving demand to the protocol, many of which do extract their own fee (e.g. Metamask,) In aggregate, that demand helps keep Uniswap&apos;s monopoly on supply in tact, as there are strong network effects to LPing where the demand is routed. Today, Uniswap has a simple fee switch, which may actually diminish the supply-side network effect. But if Uniswap were to update its tokeneconomic model as described in the hypothetical model above, it could help reinforce a strong moat on supply and keep the flywheel between products and protocol spinning.<br><br>You can contrast this with protocols that have a a single or more power-lawed product ecosystem. An example is OpenSea (product) vs. Seaport (protocol.) In this example, and others like it, value accrues to the company building the product. </p><p>I wrote a thread last week, comparing this market dynamic to that of &#xA0;NFT collectors who value creator royalties. The tl;dr: even if you are a product team who values decentralization, if you control the bulk of value flow, the market will make it hard to justify that value flowing to a DAO instead of the company creating it.</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Interesting to juxtapose the debate on creator royalties with the coming struggle of web3 product teams vs. protocol DAOs they build on top of.<br><br>If efficient markets eliminate creator royalties, what will they do to DAOs over time?<br><br>I think it depends on power-laws...</p>&#x2014; Jesse Walden (@jessewldn) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1613664347993296905?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 12, 2023</a></blockquote>
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</figure><p>I was discussing all this with<a href="https://twitter.com/ptrwtts"> Peter Watts</a> from<a href="https://twitter.com/reservoir0x"> Reservoir</a>, and he raised a great point, that perhaps one additional consideration for protocol value is the degree to which the protocol can successfully monopolize supply. </p><p>As I wrote above, if demand is distributed at the product level, but supply is monopolized due to network effects (e.g. Uniswap) you may be in the sweetspot for protocol value. &#xA0;However, if supply is able to easily multitenant AND there is fierce competition for demand at the product level, you may end up in a race to the bottom in both product and protocol, as is increasingly the case in NFT marketplaces. The former seems more likely with peer-to-contract markets, and the latter more likely in peer-to-peer markets.</p><p>Of course, reality isn&apos;t so theoretical, and if you aggregate lots of users, or lots of developers, there&apos;s likely a way to step into the flow. But its an interesting thought.</p><p>What didn&apos;t I think of? What did this prompt you to think of? <br>Please jump in on <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1616442806326919173?s=20&amp;t=bOoeoAqk8vxRUixuJL0wQQ">Twitter</a> or <a href="farcaster://casts/0xc6adc8a78eb0803d35ce4705896a35d068982f8c8bdea07ab88ea64f0253984e/0xc6adc8a78eb0803d35ce4705896a35d068982f8c8bdea07ab88ea64f0253984e">Farcaster</a>.<br></p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[More than semantics: "crypto" vs. "web3" is about what will be decentralized]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>I was struck by Matt Huang&apos;s <a href="https://twitter.com/matthuang/status/1612530089371271168">&quot;Web3 has done much damage&quot; tweet</a>, which disparages the term Web3 in favor of &#x201C;crypto.&#x201D; </p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Crypto is a 100x better term than web3, always has been<br><br>Web3 has caused much damage and misplaced expectations</p>&#x2014; Matt Huang (@matthuang)</blockquote></figure>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/decentralization-assets-protocols-products/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">63c6b37f08e45f04fed9639e</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2023 14:54:09 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was struck by Matt Huang&apos;s <a href="https://twitter.com/matthuang/status/1612530089371271168">&quot;Web3 has done much damage&quot; tweet</a>, which disparages the term Web3 in favor of &#x201C;crypto.&#x201D; </p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Crypto is a 100x better term than web3, always has been<br><br>Web3 has caused much damage and misplaced expectations</p>&#x2014; Matt Huang (@matthuang) <a href="https://twitter.com/matthuang/status/1612530089371271168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2023</a></blockquote>
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</figure><p>&quot;Crypto&quot; has its roots in two camps with strong overlap: &#xA0;money-crypto and the more political &#x201C;sovereign individual&#x201D; crypto&#x2014;the nexus of which is decentralized <em>assets and protocols, finance and autonomy. </em>It follows that &#x201C;<strong>crypto&#x201D; commonly refers to decentralized </strong><em><strong>assets/protocols, whereas &#x201C;Web3&#x201D; broadly espouses decentralization of consumer products, a more egalitarian and expansive strand that builds on the origins of the former. </strong></em></p><p>When I talk about my work, I always say I work in crypto, though I still think the term &#x201C;Web3&#x201D;<a href="https://jessewalden.com/web2-0-vs-web3/"> is useful, and will serve a lasting purpose</a>. &#xA0;That said, I think the underlying argument, that Web3 has caused some indirection, has merit worth exploring further:</p><p>It is the case that building consumer products tends to benefit from centralization. In making the case for <a href="https://variant.fund/articles/progressive-decentralization-a-playbook-for-building/">progressive decentralization</a>, I argued for centralized product development at the outset, which benefits from rapid iteration and singular vision. <a href="https://a16zcrypto.com/progressive-decentralization-a-high-level-framework/">A more recent supplement</a> on the topic argued that this can be pursued so long as future decentralization is worked into the initial planning and vision. But what resonated about the tweet is that it was misguided to think that everything&#x2014; especially well-known Web 2.0 apps&#x2014;would be better off decentralized as DAOs. </p><p>I&#x2019;ve argued that assets (<a href="https://variant.fund/articles/tokens-are-products/">tokens) can and should be products</a>&#x2014;NFTs being a prime example&#x2014;and I continue to think there is ample room for tokens and DAOs to be fun and transformative consumer experiences. But I&#x2019;ve also refocused on a specific line in the original thesis penned for Variant, that &#x201C;<a href="https://variant.fund/articles/the-ownership-economy-crypto-and-consumer-software/">ownership will be a keystone of new <strong>user experiences</strong></a>.&#x201D; </p><p>Next generation consumer products may be built around making users into owners, but it doesn&#x2019;t follow that the platforms facilitating access to new ownership experiences will all be owned like co-ops, by their users. While the latter is newly possible, the realization of users as owners may be barbelled: at the fat head, for critical infrastructure that depends on decentralization for its core value proposition suchas Ethereum or Uniswap. And on the other side, the long-tail of networks that wouldn&#x2019;t exist any other way&#x2014;NFT and DAOs formed around them, online investment clubs, trade guilds, etc. In the middle, we may find companies that broker access to both ends. </p><p>Weighed against Variant&#x2019;s mission to build a more equitable internet, I take a glass half full view of this: even if users don&#x2019;t own the product interface for the next major consumer social product, its still the case that for the first time, users will have the chance to <a href="https://variant.mirror.xyz/T8kdtZRIgy_srXB5B06L8vBqFHYlEBcv6ae2zR6Y_eo">own <em>a</em> <em>piece </em>of the internet</a>: their content, their identity, and their on-chain data. This is a forcing function for platforms to be more aligned with users, economically and otherwise, because ownership empowers users to participate in market activity more directly and vote with their feet. That is the glass half full take. Half empty is that it would be better if everyone could earn equity-like upside in every product and service they use &#x2013; in other words, for user ownership to extend to the product level. The other half empty take is that because platforms have network effects, the utility of user ownership of underlying crypto assets can still be eroded, as we&#x2019;ve seen unfold recently as NFT marketplaces enact whitelists and blacklists regarding where NFTs can trade. <br><br>To get to the extreme realization of user ownership of consumer interface products, there&#x2019;s no question in my mind that it must be done through progressive decentralization, where ownership is intrinsic to the product flywheel and user experience. It could be that the time-scale to progressively decentralize these types of applications is much longer than folks in the &#x201C;web3&#x201D; camp would have hoped&#x2014;wherein it makes sense to decentralize unstable elements of otherwise mature and stable products, like, for example, content moderation for a scaled social network.</p><p>To tie this up: long live crypto and long live Web3. They both need our chants, because its definitely the case that 10 years from now, just as today, nobody will use the name of the technology or its epoch number to describe what they do on the internet. </p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[“Web 2.0” vs. “Web3”]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>In 2006, Paul Graham <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html">wrote a great post wherein he concluded that Web 2.0 was a credible term</a> because it meant &#x201C;using the web the way it&apos;s meant to be used.&#x201D; I think this is a good lens to interpret the term Web3, and why</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/web2-0-vs-web3/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">63c5dbb608e45f04fed96392</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jan 2023 23:21:31 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In 2006, Paul Graham <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html">wrote a great post wherein he concluded that Web 2.0 was a credible term</a> because it meant &#x201C;using the web the way it&apos;s meant to be used.&#x201D; I think this is a good lens to interpret the term Web3, and why it is still a useful term, in-spite of its baggage and any associated misdirection. &#xA0;</p><p>Web3 is a set of expectations, about what the internet can and should be: native money, assets, ownable identity and media, transparency, automation, control, privacy, new institutions and more meritocratic and equitable outcomes. </p><p>Web 2.0 was not a revolution against what came before, but an expansion of it &#x2014; &#xA0;a realization of new markets and networks, enabled by using the technology the way it wanted to be used. In time, that is what Web3 will come to be known as too.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[How does DeFi cross the chasm?]]></title><description><![CDATA[Three popular narratives emanating from the crypto community as to how DeFi can touch billions of end users.]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/how-does-defi-cross-the-chasm/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">5eea128508e45f04fed96167</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:27:02 GMT</pubDate><media:content url="https://jessewalden.com/content/images/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-17-at-11.11.51-AM.png" medium="image"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<img src="https://jessewalden.com/content/images/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-17-at-11.11.51-AM.png" alt="How does DeFi cross the chasm?"><p>For a category that was unnamed and barely existed only two years ago, the <a href="https://defipulse.com/">growth in #DeFi</a> is incredibly impressive. But within the crypto community I don&apos;t think it is controversial to point out that DeFi is primarily used by insiders and enthusiasts, and mostly for speculation on crypto itself.</p><p>I say this without negative judgement. In fact, speculation is productive as it allows this nascent category to bootstrap something far more consequential. And yes, <a href="https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy">the next big thing usually starts out looking like a toy. </a></p><p>Still, this begs the question, how will DeFi <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm">cross the chasm</a>? &#xA0;<br><br>No doubt, the UX needs to improve, but I don&apos;t think thats all thats left to do. DeFi needs to solve a real problem (and do so 10x better than alternatives) in order to get mainstream users engaged. &#xA0;<br><br>Below are three popular narratives emanating from the crypto community as to how this might happen. Personally, I am less engaged by the first two, and most excited about the last. I&apos;m curious to hear what other narratives excite you, and hope to kick the tires on this discussion <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1273246261349617664?s=20">on Twitter</a>. &#xA0;<br><br>1. <strong>Global Adoption: </strong><em>Bank the unbanked</em></p><p>For years, crypto has embraced the narrative that it can bank the unbanked. Its true, a crypto wallet is a bank account for anyone with an internet connection. And a DeFi savings account is 10x better than nothing. <br><br>That said, it is unclear how and when the unbanked will arrive in DeFi en masse. To date, I haven&apos;t seen any data indicating that this transformation is underway. All indications are that the bulk of the liquidity in DeFi today is from &quot;whales&quot; or large accounts. <br><br>Projects like <a href="celo.org">Celo</a> are making an effort to bootstrap use of crypto rails in the developing world by making stable, USD-pegged crypto assets easy to earn, save and transact. India&apos;s recent reversal on its crypto ban is an encouraging new market to explore. </p><p>I am optimistic about the unbanked arriving in crypto, but unclear on exactly what the catalyst will be. Perhaps it is simply a trust gap to be filled by a combination of friendly user experience, word of mouth, and some form of insurance&#x2014;all of which are happening, slowly but surely. I&apos;m not the target user persona here, so its difficult for me to judge exactly where we are at in the development of this catalyst. I think a <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1272543126847205376?s=20">Gini Coefficient Index</a> of DeFi may be a good indicator of long-tail, consumer adoption.</p><p><strong>2. Institutional Adoption: </strong><em>DeFi as global casino; Welcome Wall St!</em></p><p>Proponents of this line of thinking tend view the most important DeFi metric as &quot;AUP&quot; or Assets Under Protocol. With this view, it doesn&apos;t matter if there are relatively few users, so long as they are whales that pump liquidity into the system. </p><p>No doubt, liquidity is important to the bootstrapping process, but I do think there is a glass ceiling before Wall St wholesale pivots to DeFi. It seems unlikely that adoption will happen top-down from Wall St, and far more likely that institutional adoption follows bottom-up retail. I think that is generally true for any radically new technology platform. &#xA0;</p><p><strong>3. A &quot;Real&quot; Crypto Economy: </strong><em>non-financial consumer apps lead the way</em></p><p>To me, the most exciting path to mainstream adoption follows from a &quot;real&quot; economy built on crypto rails. That is an economy that is not in service of crypto speculation itself, but rather related to real goods and services who&apos;s economic layer is coordinated on-chain. Products like <a href="http://withfoundation.com">Foundation</a> aim to bring mainstream creators and their audiences to crypto by allowing them to fund creative projects and earn new revenue streams. <a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1260727306395541506?s=20">Reddit hopes to grow engagement</a> by leveraging community currencies to make users actual owners of their sub&apos;s internal economy. Imagine users taking a loan against a pair of tokenized Yeezys. &#xA0;Or a Redditor exchanging their subreddit&apos;s <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/gj8tm1/introducing_rfortnitebr_bricks/">$BRICKS</a> for dollars and opening a savings account. <br><br>All of this is possible because of the easy <a href="https://jessewalden.com/4-eras-of-blockchain-computing-degrees-of-composability/">composability of smart contracts</a>. Neither Foundation nor Reddit needs to go out of their way to build this functionality themselves. The open, user-controlled nature of blockchain computing allows any developer to plug into these ecosystems and offer their users financial services. The result could be a rapid move from non-financial applications into DeFi. <br><br>My view is that DeFi gets a lot more interesting once there are mainstream users conducting real economic activity on-chain, beyond crypto speculation. How that might materialize is a topic for another post.</p><p>But one extension of this line of thinking may be that the most general DeFi protocols (e.g. stablecoins, money markets, exchange) may be the best positioned to benefit from composability with non-financial apps. The simpler and more general the protocol, the easier to integrate across new verticals. More complex financial products, like specialized derivatives, may see greater tailwinds from the later arrival of institutional capital, whenever Wall St. wakes up to see the size of the opportunity has grown beyond their wildest expectations.<br><br>Given the pace of innovation and growth, I plan to be pleasantly surprised by any or all of these narratives coming to fruition. <br><br>I&apos;m curious what other narratives people have in mind. And beyond narratives, <a href="https://twitter.com/CamiRusso/status/1272200960048332801?s=20">what metrics are important to track? </a>What do you think? How will DeFi cross the chasm to billions of end-users? <br><br><a href="https://twitter.com/jessewldn/status/1273246261349617664?s=20">Join the discussion on Twitter</a>.</p>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Crypto’s Business Model is Familiar. What Isn’t is Who Benefits]]></title><description><![CDATA[<p>Many entrepreneurs and investors think that crypto projects can&#x2019;t capture value because they are based on open source code. The thinking goes that if you develop open source code, someone will come along and copy it, luring away your users and any potential for revenue. That doesn&#x2019;</p>]]></description><link>https://jessewalden.com/cryptos-business-model-is-familiar-what-isnt-is-who-benefits-2/</link><guid isPermaLink="false">5e907b1008e45f04fed9610d</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[Jesse Walden]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:02:46 GMT</pubDate><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Many entrepreneurs and investors think that crypto projects can&#x2019;t capture value because they are based on open source code. The thinking goes that if you develop open source code, someone will come along and copy it, luring away your users and any potential for revenue. That doesn&#x2019;t seem like a good foundation for a business. </p><p>But crypto networks do adhere to a sustainable business model, and it&#x2019;s one that will be quickly familiar to those who understand the dynamics behind valuable Web 2.0 marketplaces. Like marketplace companies, crypto projects seek to create defensibility via <a href="https://a16z.com/2018/12/13/16-metrics-network-effects/">network effects</a> that allow for fee streams and make users reluctant to switch to a competing service. </p><p>What makes crypto unique is its potential to expand on that familiar framework. The principal innovation of crypto networks is their ability to grow network effects by enabling users to share in the value they create. </p><p><strong><strong>Network Effects, Switching Costs, and Defensibility</strong></strong></p><p>Misconceptions around crypto and value capture are understandable. Open source code has enabled trillions of dollars to be generated by software companies that use it, but the communities that develop that code typically haven&#x2019;t had a means to capture much of the value directly. </p><p>That&#x2019;s because there is a major difference between open source code <em><em>libraries</em></em>, which can be easily copied, and <em><em>networks</em></em> that form around running open source code as a service. An open source library is an empty blueprint. It&#x2019;s dead code, until it&#x2019;s run as an instance and is <a href="https://denisnazarov.com/what-comes-after-open-source/">filled with data, users or both</a>, forming a network or service.<br><br>Many internet platforms are built using open source libraries, which are run by companies as an instance or service. With each new database entry, or user, the service becomes more valuable to each individual user, generating a network effect. This creates an inherent cost for users switching to a new, competing service. These switching costs make it harder for competitors to break through, creating defensibility. Imagine a clone of Facebook with no friends, or a clone of Uber with no drivers. It&#x2019;s why big platforms get bigger while competitors get stuck. </p><p>Once defensibility is established through network effects, switching costs become the basis for fees that companies can begin to charge users, advertisers or both. This model is viable so long as the fee is below the switching cost of moving to an alternative. </p><p><strong><strong>Why Forking Does Not Eliminate Switching Costs</strong></strong></p><p>Like Web 2.0 platforms, a well-designed crypto network is a live, running service, and it too can be the basis of strong network effects that create switching costs. Given that crypto networks rely on open source code, it&#x2019;s true that they can be more easily copied (or forked). But while replication of code may be free, the social cost of coordinating all network participants to move to an empty room is non-zero. Add to that the trust and familiarity that come with brand, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect">lindy effect</a>, and smart contract integrations, and you have a recipe for entrenching an existing service, building its network effects, and generating switching costs.</p><p>Bitcoin&#x2019;s network effect derives from more people considering it a store of value, which in turn, incentivizes miners to secure the network. Ethereum&#x2019;s network effect derives from developers who deploy apps &#x2014; each becomes a building block that other devs can compose into higher order services, driving increased usage, and demand for ETH. </p><p>At the application layer, Uniswap, an automated token exchange, becomes more useful with each new user because additional liquidity in the marketplace results in better prices on trades. Compound, a money-market protocol for lending and borrowing, offers more competitive interest rates on loans as lending liquidity increases.</p><p>In every case, a fork of the original network will initially be technically equivalent but functionally inferior to the canonical instance. A fork of Compound would offer worse interest rates due to lower liquidity. A fork of Uniswap would have inferior pricing for the same reason. A fork of Bitcoin is less likely to be viewed as a store of value or medium of exchange and thus less likely to capture value. </p><p>This is the same basic principle of defensibility in traditional Web 2.0 platforms: attract users, build network effects, and increase defensibility through switching costs. That switching cost forms the basis for margin extraction, usually in the form of a fee: </p><!--kg-card-begin: html--><table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><b>Crypto</b></td>
<td></td>
<td><b>Web 2.0</b></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">Bitcoin</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per transfer</span></em></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">PayPal</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per transfer</span></em></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">Ethereum</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per function call</span></em></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">Twilio</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per API call</span></em></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">Compound</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per borrow</span></em></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">LendingClub</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per borrow</span></em></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">Uniswap</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per exchange</span></em></td>
<td><span style="font-weight: 400">Coinbase</span></td>
<td><em><span style="font-weight: 400">Fee per exchange</span></em></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table><!--kg-card-end: html--><p>So long as a service remains <a href="https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2019/10/6/protocols-as-minimally-extractive-coordinators">minimally extractive</a> &#x2014; charging a fee that is lower than the costs to switch &#x2014; its model is viable.<br><br>So what&#x2019;s new in crypto isn&#x2019;t the business model. It&#x2019;s who benefits from it. </p><p><strong><strong>The Differentiator: Crypto&#x2019;s Value Distribution Capability</strong></strong></p><p>Crypto tokens are an innovation akin to that of data packets. We can now move bits of value in the way we move bits of information: using an open standard, in very granular transmissions, instantly, to anyone, anywhere in the world. This means that valuable crypto services now have the unique opportunity to redistribute that value directly to the users who generate it. </p><p>Designed correctly, an effective distribution of a fee stream can further entrench network effects by giving users a direct economic incentive to contribute, generating more defensibility, which in turn, reinforces the viability of the fee stream in the first place. This is a virtuous loop that has the potential to result in sustainable, user-owned networks that grow in size and defensibility because of their <a href="https://jessewalden.com/past-present-future-from-co-ops-to-cryptonetworks/">cooperative economic model</a>.</p><p>Crypto networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are the very first community-owned-and-operated platforms at scale. But given the right tools, many more founders may be able to leverage this new stack as a tool to distribute economic value, build network effects and generate value for themselves, investors, and their user communities.</p><p>By making economic collaboration with users a primary feature of the product experience, founders may be able to unlock networks that are bigger, more competitive, and more defensible, while simultaneously enabling more innovation &#x2014; all thanks to crypto&#x2019;s open source foundation.<br></p><blockquote><em>This post was originally published on <a href="https://a16z.com/2020/04/08/crypto-network-effects/">a16z.com</a> </em><br><br><em>The views expressed herein are those of the individual personnel quoted herein and are not the views of AHCM or its affiliates. This presentation is provided solely for informational purposes and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation to invest in any instrument nor do they constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services.</em><br><br><em>This content should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax and other related matters concerning any investment. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investor or prospective investor, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund.</em><br><br>Past performance is not indicative of future results. Charts and graphs provided herein are for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Please see <a href="https://a16z.com/disclosures" rel="nofollow">https://a16z.com/disclosures</a> &#xA0;for additional important information.</blockquote>]]></content:encoded></item></channel></rss>