Has Crypto Changed?

In this video, we're going to ask the question, has crypto changed? And this is going to be part of a long-running series. I'm going to do this every month, and it's going to be called the crypto meta. The kind of meta game for cryptocurrencies. What's in, what's out, infrastructure, dApps, what's happening in this whole ecosystem. And this is going to be my take and my view on what's going to happen now, and kind of the trends for the future as well. And I think this is a perfect time to do this, because I'm at the Blockchain Economic Forum in San Francisco. And this is the third one there is. And the cool thing is that I've actually attended the first Blockchain Economic Forum in New York. And that was in October, right before the crypto explosion. And I can tell you the dynamic is very, very different. Just the feeling on the floor, the people attending. And I'll talk about why that is and how that is in this episode. And of course, everything covered here is my personal opinion and not financial advice. So let's start off with what's changed a lot. You guys probably know October months last year was a very, very different time. And this is very well reflected in this conference. So in the first Blockchain Economic Forum, you see a lot of new players coming in. And they might be people who are in the financial space. They might be people who have been investing, angel investors have been in this space for a while. Or in the tech industry for a while. But the interesting thing about when in October was that they knew very little about cryptocurrencies. It was very much bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, trying to figure out, oh, what's a consensus mechanism? What's this Bitcoin thing? What's Ethereum doing? Now, coming in right now in this current Blockchain Economic Forum all the way in June, we see something that's similar. The guys are the same, but they've gained a lot of veterancy. Sure, they're the same internet startup guys, but they know a lot more about the Blockchain space. They understand consensus mechanisms. They understand the architecture. They understand what works, what doesn't work. And of course, they're bringing a lot of their experiences along. So what I see is that it's not just a learning phase right now. We're kind of past the learning phase for Blockchain. Right now, in terms of even the meetups and the people, the discussions they have, it's a much higher level. What are the token economics? What's the long-term value of this project? What community are you building? These are much more in-depth questions that these projects are asking and these people are asking projects. So with that, I feel like crypto is changing for the better. It's getting older. It's maturing. It's becoming less of something that someone dabbles in because it's cool, but rather a tool to solve problems. And we're starting to see what problems can be solved and what can't. And this is a very kind of big turning point for cryptocurrencies. We're starting to discuss the economics and the token economics of this. How to encourage long-term community growth and how to let the community participate rather than just, oh, token value, token value, token value. So I feel like this is a fundamental shift, not just for the better, but it's a sign of an aging industry. And in a way, when an industry ages, the dynamics are going to be very different as well. Because we've been in this long-term, kind of very stable period. We had a dip after January and we haven't really bounced up. And a lot of people are expecting a very rigorous, bold bounce back. But my personal opinion here is that you see that people are much more disciplined now. And I feel like those days where Bitcoin prices can shoot up like 20% consistently for two days in a row and then just dive all the way back down. You know, those mega pushes, I feel, is going to be more and more of a pass. As this industry grows, as it ages, people are much more disciplined. And as a result, the kind of this media fury, this whole FOMO feeling, controlling that FOMO is going to be better. And also the FUD as well. So that's what we've been seeing all over the markets for the past few months as well. Yes, the markets have been down. But at the same time, we don't have these crazy minus 20, minus 30 days as well. It's much more of a maturing period where people can kind of reflect. Of course, I'm not going to say that this is not going to be, you know, volatile. Crypto by its very nature is super volatile because we still haven't figured out how to evaluate everything. We're discussing it, right? The difference is that we're discussing it. But we still haven't figured out the magic formula of how to structure the tokens, how the economic works, and how that correlates to user growth. This is something that is going to have to be worked out over time as DABs start to become more popular. So as these formulas start to advance, as the theories start to develop, it's going to be a much more stable period. It's not going to be all the way like stocks, okay? The traditional equity market that's been running for many, many years, a lot longer than crypto. So the ways to evaluate something, like say, for example, if it's a tech stock, then there's various formulas you can apply. There's various factors you can look at. Here in crypto, we're still not at that stage yet. We have infrastructure projects. We have DAB projects. We have maybe gaming projects. They're all different. And we still don't really fully know how to evaluate this yet. So that's why there's still a lot of volatility in the market. And there's a lot of people still trying to make sense of everything. So that's why it's going to be volatile. But what we're going to see is that the volatility is going to start decreasing over time. And also, there are people who are regularly asking the right questions in this space. Because just like every project, a well-managed project has characteristic signatures. And I feel like here we have the people asking the right questions. What are the signatures of a successful project? And they can diagnose projects too. In fact, they can look at a team and say, all right, the CEO's got a good vision. But maybe the CMO's very weak. You know, the marketing's very weak. And maybe the CFO isn't doing their job. So they can start diagnosing these projects, treating them as a startup and help them grow. Because, you know, after all, a lot of coins are startups. And this isn't a new game. So what I feel is as this industry matures, we have more and more people with experience in growing applications, making applications, and of course, making this decentralized world work. So that's my current feeling. We're still kind of at this phase where we're waiting for new killer applications and large user numbers. And we still don't see them yet. But I feel like we're in the right direction to go. So that's a very hopeful message from me at the Blockchain Economic Forum. And this is my kind of take on the crypto meta. In the future, I will talk about and compare perhaps this kind of feeling for infrastructure projects versus DApps, the current state of a few DApps, what's popular. I'll love to hear what you guys want me to discuss in this series. I just want to make something very different from a daily news show. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. Remember to click the subscribe button for more videos like this. And click the like button if you like this particular format. I'll love to hear your feedback on it. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. See you next time.