punk

The kinds of applications that I want to see are applications that are (i) useful in a sustainable way, and (ii) don't sacrifice on the principles (permissionlessness, decentralization, etc) I think DEXes are great, and I use them every week. I think decentralized stablecoins (eg. RAI) are great. I think polymarket is great. I think USDC is less great than RAI, but as a practical matter we simply have to respect that it's incredibly convenient and lots of people use it. It's incredibly useful for me personally when doing international donations, way more convenient than banking. We are here to try to make the global economy and society more open and free, and people in emerging markets using stablecoins to freely transact is a real live use case that's happening everywhere. USDC on ethereum is also far better than account-to-account transfers inside centralized exchanges, which also happens a lot. If we get lots of people using USDC, that creates a situation where it becomes easier for people to move to other more decentralized stablecoins too. Things that I *don't* respect, are basically things whose attractiveness comes from some temporary source that has no sustainability, eg. I felt no excitement toward the 2021-era liquidity farming craze, because it was obvious that it came from token issuances that are fundamentally temporary. If people tell me "you can get good yield by parking your coins here", my question always is, "where does the yield come from?". Who are the people on the other side of the transaction, who are paying the yield? In those cases where there is a specific answer to the question, that there is a good reason to believe will remain true in 5 years, then I am absolutely excited about it.