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21) All the metrics are popping, but it's also basically a circle-jerk. So where does that leave us? Is it all a brilliant growth strategy and marketing plan, or just smoke and mirrors? I'd like to tell the story of two exchanges here: FCoin and BitMax.

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22) For a while, they were very similar. Both were printing billions of dollars of "volume" per day. All the volume was transmining--content-free wash trades incentivized by exchange token airdrops. Both tokens pumped exponentially, and then crashed all the way back down.

23) And when their exchange token crashed, all the bullshit fell away and what FCoin had left was... nothing. Or, really, less than nothing. No volume, no valuation, and no assets. So how about BitMax, another exchange that lurked at the top of the fake volume leaderboards?

24) Well I'd like to think that we played some part in this, although the truth is probably that it was going happen with our without us. They had successfully built up a significant userbase. And in 2019, BitMax turned off their transmining and fake volume.

25) We were talking to them at the time, and said that we were only comfortable working with them if they cut out the transmining. They promised they were discontinuing anything that encouraged fake volume. We were skeptical. As it turns out, that skepticism was unwarranted.

26) BitMax did, in fact, turn off their transmining, and the fake volume went away. And after doing that, they started to build. They launched more features, improved their tech, and listed projects.

27) And one remarkable thing about BitMax is that it doesn’t just list random projects: it’s quietly started to list _good_ projects. Their projects have performed well, and it’s not all a “market making” mirage--that’s what happens when you choose good teams.

28) And, on top of all of that--they’re really good to work with. We’ve had a long series of good interactions with them, and we’ve heard similar stories from others.

29) The exchange started in many ways as a marketing ploy--which I guess is obvious from the name. But over the last year they’ve successfully combined the userbase they got with an increasingly great product.

9:40 PM · Jul 19, 2020Twitter Web App

30) FCoin and BitMax both started out as large marketing plays--not unlike liquidity farming today. But they diverged after that; one went under while the other ended up as one of the better exchanges in the space.

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31) DeFi is now facing that choice. The growth so far has been almost entirely hot air and marketing bubbles. But the same could be said about Apple in some ways. And, obviously, Juicero. What will happen when the hype fades? What industry will we leave behind?

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32) DeFi Summer could burst, leaving an embarrassing mess behind. Or it could mark the beginning of the true decentralization of finance. To get there, we have to build good products, and leave behind a space we're proud of when the smoke and mirrors fade away.

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