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4) Mostly this is good. But there are some bad parts of it, too. And one is that it can be easy to deceive yourself.

5) Most startups have some pitch about how they'll disrupt the world. They're grandiose and insanely optimistic. And most of the teams basically know this, and feel a bit sheepish about their marketing.

6) But crypto is weird. In crypto, a large number of teams really do think they're going to disrupt the world, and the ecosystem cheers them on. Now, part of this is because there _is_ a ton of innovation in crypto! But some isn't.

7) Here are three company descriptions: (a) the 10th biggest US crypto exchange (b) an Ethereum sidechain scaling solution built for high-performance decentralized infrastructure capable of growing the entire ETH DeFi ecosystem by 100x (c) a bank account and a token

8) Now, this is a bit unfair: I just made up (b). Also, (a) and (c) wouldn't describe themselves that way.

@PaxosGlobal

would probably note that they built regulated institutional crypto infrastructure with with one of the few DTC-compatible licenses ever, powering

9) @circlepay would probably say that they built the second largest stablecoin with $25b AUM, powering

's crypto solutions.

10) And what about (b), the sidechain scaling solution? Well, honestly, it's one way you could describe the fact that

@FTX_Official

and other exchanges allow deposits/withdrawals of some stablecoins on both Ethereum and Tron. Just put up a website which calls those wallet APIs.

11) The point, really, is that unless you do a deep dive on crypto companies, it's often hard to figure out what they've really done. Did they build tech that could change the world? Or did they just whitelabel an API and call it a bridge?

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12) But this isn't a case of founder deception or company fraud. Because everyone involved believes their company is the revolutionary one, whether or not they correctly implemented robust optimistic rollups; whether their volume is organic or trans-mining.

1:16 AM · Jul 3, 2021Twitter Web App

13) The truth is, right now, it's relatively speaking easy to create a token in crypto with a $100m market cap--way easier than building a brick and mortar business. And way easier than actually making $100m unincentivized net profit.

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14) It's easy, in crypto, to mistake the simple paths towards valuation for the excellence of the product built.

15) This confuses the hell out of investors and users. But worse it confuses the companies themselves, sometimes. They think they've already built tech that will change the world, and so try to go for adoption.

16) And maybe their idea actually was potentially huge! The problem is that they skip the step where they _actually build a great product_, because early valuation success makes it seem like maybe they already have.

17) And so you get video game on blockchain companies that don't even realize their vision for a game requires more throughput than a blockchain can theoretically have, instead of thinking critically about what the right fit is and starting with a successful game or team.

18) And you get DeFi apps with revolutionary ideas that go for mass adoption before fixing prohibitive fees, or NFTs that make no sense and obviously won't have mass appeal, or exchanges with dysfunctional technology riddled with fake volume.

19) Or, you just get crazy projections.

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Jan 11, 2021

1) BAKKT is about to go public. There are a number of "interesting" things in their deck. sec.gov/Archives/edgar

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20) And these can help, sometimes, short term. But long term they don't set crypto up for success. Long term, there's only one thing that can make us succeed: building great products, piece by piece, with rapid iteration and flexible tech and great user experiences

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