isidro Crypto (✸,✸) (💜,💛)

We've just hit $1,500,000,000 in notional trading volume. It's onwards and upwards at Everything.

This cycle created a strange growing pain. Institutions moved in but retail userbases didn't grow. And since the market is still so retail-driven on the price side, the result was a weak bull by previous standards followed by a confusing bear where everyone's asking: what's next? The sentiment this has drifted toward is bleak. Blockchains weren't built for retail. They never will be. Move on. But that's not what's actually happening. What's actually happening is what Geoffrey Moore calls "Crossing the Chasm." All the technology built onchain for retail users is at the inflection point where it either dies as a fun little experiment or becomes seriously adopted. There is no third option. Yes, adoption is more visible on the institutional side right now. But what about all the game-changing retail-facing applications? Do they just die forever because "blockchain scary"? Because the UX was bad in 2022? Because some people got burned on leverage they didn't understand? I don't accept that. With this sentiment looming, there's actually an enormous opportunity. Not to hype. Not to "ignite the trenches" by giving people new things to gamble on. That era is dead for now, but does that mean the all the tech should die with it? The opportunity is to produce real, undeniable outcomes for real people. To bring genuinely useful applications to users who don't know or care what chain they're on. To make the infrastructure so invisible that the only thing left is the product. That's what we're building at Spicenet. And we're making a deliberate stance: if there's any hope left of onchain retail successfully crossing the chasm, we intend to be the ones who make it happen. Which, for what it's worth, aligns well with launching in a bear market. There's something clarifying about building when the noise dies down. No hype cycle to ride. No shortcuts. We don't care what the market says this quarter. We're the makers of our own destiny.