Alex 🥦

The shift in the crypto fundraising landscape the past 6 months has been insane. Crypto VCs used to have to constantly be networking/writing/podcasting/going on spaces/promoting your thesis/getting on 10 deal flow calls a week, to get into good deals...now it's literally enough to just have capital to write checks. Deals are being pushed rather than dug out. Inbound if people know you have money is at an all-time high. Most firms are either 1) Out of money 2) Moved to Series A and beyond or 3) Fundraising (with no success). Deals that used to close in 2-3 weeks now close in 2-3 months. Firms with questionable business models or copy pasta of the latest trend are getting zero primary or follow-on funding (Good news!). There are now realistically <20 firms writing checks in pre-seed/seed. VCs basically have the pick of any deal they want, with more time to do DD. IMHO 25/26 are going to be historic vintages for those who stick around.

With all due respect to Hasseeb, I completely disagree with this take. Chris was and is a mentor to me, I'm not pretending otherwise. But neither Chris nor Haseeb are builders in the category. I have spent the last year in the trenches trying to build non-speculative consumer crypto usecases. Ignore "non-financial". That's a useless umbrella. I care about non-speculative. Here's what I know with total clarity: Three years ago it was 100% impossible to ship a good consumer crypto experience. Not hard. Not early. Impossible. The wallet experience was complete and utter dogshit. Injected wallets are an unacceptable UX. Seed phrases, unacceptable. Blind signing, unacceptable. Bridging, unacceptable. Here's your onboarding experience for a consumer media flow: 1. Install a fox-faced browser extension 2. Write down a 24 word seed phrase and hide it under your fridge (btw now some romanian dude's gonna break int your house) 3. Select a chain if god willing you understand what that means 4. Go find a bridge (Wormhole, LayerZero, ...) if you guessed wrong 5. Sign hexadecimal strings with very scary error messages 6. "Transaction pending... would you like to increase your gas price" (wtf is gas? they'll say) Thats is before you even fund the thing. But I'm not done, on ramps were even worse. If you wanted to use some "web3 media" app, you had to open an exchange account. The UI looked like DraftKings for slop-maxxed decentralization jargon. Spin the wheel to get decentralized compute coin on Arbitrum or turbo DNS coin on Polkadot! Last cycle nonsense. Before you buy anything you need to go through a rigorous KYC process. SSN, address, Drivers License verification, transfer to your mobile device, liveness check on your face, transfer back, "a human in a remote country will check this asynchronously and we'll get back to you". Now we sign into Plaid, put our bank credentials into some random form on this new DraftKing exchange, now they can auto-draw down money. Perfect. Now god willing you've found UDSC and bought it on the right chain. You're ready to transfer out. You paste in your 40-character Hex address to the fox-head app. That'll be 24-48 hours before it arrives due to ACH fraud risk. Aaaand now you can use the web3 media app. And KYB on ramps for enterprises? Rectal inspection. I need not go deeper. Consumer apps are viral flywheels. If there's too much friction on the axle, the flywheel never spins. Crypto had superglue on the flywheel. So when we say "the market rejected consumer crypto," we should ask a basic question. Did we ever actually ship it in a form that normal people could evaluate. Finance worked because the users were willing to tolerate absurd friction. Traders will jump through flaming hoops when their perceived EV is +infinite (because they're a genius and have alpha or astrology signals or whatever). Media and other consumer activities do not get that tolerance budget. Now enough with the pessimism of the past. Let's fast forward to today (or next 3 mo). - Embedded wallets are real - OAuth style onboarding is real - Headless custody is real - In app onramps are real - Stablecoin onramps are real (this is a distinct thing and is critically important and I don't have time to explain in this post) - KYB capable providers are emerging Privy. Bridge. Stripe. Zerohash. Coinbases' new stack. This stuff is recent. Widely usable versions are maybe two years old. Broad developer adoption is even newer. For the first time you can do something like: - Sign in with email - Wallet created under the hood - Buy stablecoins inside the app - Transact instantly No exchange account, no raffle spinny wheels for decentralized slop, no fox icon, no seed phrase under your fridge. That stack did not exist in a usable form when most of the "consumer experiments" were run. After teh blood sweat and tears out of the L1 engineers, L2 engineers, the cryptographers, the wallet teams, the exchange teams, the compliance teams, and the onramp providers, we are finally getting something that resembles a sane consumer stack. We are just getting the grease. That does not mean consumer crypto is inevitable. It does mean we are only now in a position to run the experiment honestly. It's the best time to build in crypto, in the history of crypto. If it fails from here, with real UX and real onboarding and real distribution, then fine. I'll eat my shoe. Call it dead.

With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take. Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases. OK, think about this for a second. Does this pass the smell test? Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really? If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams. Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope. Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever. Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature. 2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value 2014: Tether - stablecoins 2015: Ethereum - programmable money 2017: ICOs - capital formation 2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket) 2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name 2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked) 2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off) All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis. In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto. The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry." I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes. Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions. But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.