@blknoiz06 Similar thing is happening in AI. As app development gets commoditized, being able to build matters less and the edge moves toward high agency, taste, building something competent, and mastering distribution + reputation.

The energy between Pump and Fomo might be exactly the thrust needed to take onchain finance mainstream. The two competing will likely push this from a niche trading sector within Crypto Twitter into something built for mainstream consumers. Pair that with the rise of trading influencers and trading related content like Market Bubble and Counterparty, and it feels very likely this industry grows at least an order of magnitude from here. The pie is going to get much bigger for everyone.

In general, I think it’s the very nature of trading sitting at the heart of crypto that has made everything feel so pvp. Investors, founders, users everyone becomes tribal about the products or coins they are buying IMO that’s kept us more insular than we realize. We’re rarely happy when someone else succeeds because we’re not invested in some shape and the teams that do make it often have to fight an unnecessarily hard battle just to get there. I think that’s one of the reasons crypto hasn’t grown as fast as it could have. The opposite is also true. When we support the teams that are winning, everyone benefits. Their success expands the market attracts more users and makes the pie bigger for everyone else If crypto became more supportive and less about “fuck you pay me” mentality. I genuinely think adoption would accelerate faster than anything we’ve seen before. We are likely our own biggest enemies.

I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what’s possible with onchain product design. Some of the most interesting experimentation has come from Adam at Tokenworks. From Circle/Pvp to NFT Strategy and now FWA, he is likely one of the best onchain product builders in the space and always challenge assumptions instead of copying what already works. Crypto needs more crypto native founders like Adam willing to run these kinds of experiments. Not every idea will work but the ones that do will create entirely new categories and lay the blueprint for future founders building onchain.

Very impressed by Armani's trajectory Started Anchor which became the standard way to build Solana programs. Then launched Backpack directly into the FTX collapse, and then spent three years chewing glass with little to no narrative behind him In hindsight the obvious bet was always Armani. Very few founders can go through what he and Backpack went through and still maintain the psychological endurance to keep building I’m not an investor but the ability to absorb that many setbacks and stay motivated is one of the cleanest signals of a great founder

Almost everything in crypto that failed the first time will eventually work sometime in the future. Bitcoin looked like it had failed many times in the past. The same will happen with NFTs, creator tokens, DAOs, gaming, TCRs, onchain reputation, rebase tokens, decentralized storage etc As time passes each of these ideas will make even more sense. I just think we’re still too early for many of them, and we don’t quite understand the need yet. But eventually it’ll make sense.

Brian Armstrong helped take crypto out of its niche bubble and into the mainstream. I respect what Vlad is doing. He is bringing massive distribution to crypto, validating that the future of finance is onchain and forcing real competition. But I would never short Brian Armstrong. Coinbase has taken big swings, including Base and socialfi. Some bets work, others do not and when it fails it hurts everyone. But I would much rather see Coinbase swing big with onchain just as it did in 2012 when crypto was just Bitcoin. When moonshots fail it hurts everyone, the users, the brand and the founders building on it. But if we are all looking for the next 100x in growth, I would much rather swing big, fail, learn and swing big again than playing it safe. In a world where every company is competing for every user nothing should be left unturned. And I respect Coinbase for going all in on Base + onchain extremely early on. With Cobie leading trading, Jesse with Base, and Brian focused on making Coinbase the defacto finance platform for every asset to me the company feels more focused than ever. Vlad is an exceptional competitor and that competition will make Coinbase sharper. I want Coinbase to win. We all should. Brian and the Coinbase team spent years of blood, sweat, and tears making crypto legit, even when most of the world turned its back on us.

Founders constantly ask which chain they should build on and whether they should go multichain from day one. Here is a simple framework that I use with Alliance founders: Is your product unique to the chain? Will helping it grow also help you grow? Can you deeply integrate with its users, founders and community? When you succeed, the chain succeeds with you. You bring users, liquidity and attention, which attracts more builders and strengthens the ecosystem. Do not go multichain early unless it is fundamental to the product. It creates more integrations, maintenance, liquidity management and points of failure. At this stage, your job is to reduce complexity, listen to users and get to PMF. You earn the right to expand to other chains once users and other chains are pulling you there. And pulling you there is nuanced, you should have clear PMF, launching tokens or winning the narrative isn’t it. It should be how many users are using your product. Going multichain does not burn a community. Taking its support and leaving for the next offer does. Pick one chain. Go deep. Win with users. Then expand

Now that some time has passed, I can probably talk about this. We had a startup who raised during the 2021/22 bull market, completely lost traction, and burned through all of the company's capital in the bear market. What followed was years of watching someone spiral. He fell into a deep depression fought constantly with his team and cofounders until they all left and eventually became verbally abusive, even threatening multiple people on the cap table, including me, for over a year. At one point, some people involved hired private security. Thankfully we were able to get the authorities involved and resolved the issue. Building and investing in crypto as a good actor is one of the hardest jobs in tech. Unlike any industry your company's value, your net worth, and emotions are constantly tied to the beat of the market 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The psychological pressure breaks more people than most realize. The people who make it through those cycles come out with resilience that's hard to replicate anywhere else. If you can survive building through multiple crypto cycles you can probably build, invest or trade in almost any industry.

Debates, arguments, and fights with your cofounder are absolutely fine if you both equally care about the business. It usually means you both want the best outcome. Where it becomes different is when one person cares more about the business than the other. Those aren't really strategy fights anymore, they're commitment issues. The most important distinction is figuring out which camp you're in. If you both care equally, compromise and move forward because at the end of the day you're both trying to build a successful company. If one person is consistently carrying more of the weight, that's the problem you need to solve first.

If you watch till the end, I explain why the next battle will be the most important one in crypto. It will decide who commands the global consumer base for everything onchain. Right now, there are only two real contenders aiming for the global market.