Samir Singh

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Hate the picture but love the article. Thanks to @CoinDesk and @sndr_krisztian for covering the launch of @NUVAFinance. Combining world-class financial assets from @Figure and others with the Web3 community building capabilities of @animocabrands Brands is a total game changer. I had the incredible opportunity to help grow the ADR business into a $1 trillion asset class at @BNYglobal. This moment in Web3 feels very similar to those early days.

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this @goodalexander post is a very good* overview of current crypto doldrums/thesis erosion I'd say real situation is even worse than portrayed here in some ways--for example, even on private RWA blockchains the blockchain is not actually the 'settlement layer' for "tokenized stocks" and most "tokenized stocks" are not "tokenized stocks" all that being said, the hopium in the post is also real: (a) crypto 'done right' is still the world's best bet for truly empowering individuals, (b) individuals have more reason to care about (and pay for/value) self-sovereignty than ever before as trust in institutions/governments erodes, and (c) with AI individuals have a chance at becoming even more self-sovereign as they are no longer limited by their own skill--for example, anyone with a ChatGPT subscription can now be an onchain power-user just by asking the right questions, which means less dependence on "DeFi web apps" etc. and fewer true attack vectors for governments so why is crypto faltering? why are OGs capitulating and fintechs taking over with unsatisfactory shortcut solutions that don't accrue any value to 'real crypto'? I personally think the issue is the same one identified by Andreas in his talk "Blockchain vs. Bullshit" 8 years ago about enterprise blockchain (youtube.com/watch?v=SMEOKD…) - -->to wit, many people don't understand (and have a vested interest in not understanding) the real unique value proposition of blockchains--what some call 'trust minimization,' or 'self-sovereignty' or 'social scalability'--and aren't building and investing accordingly the difference is that Andreas' talk once seemed obviously true and most crypto investors agreed with it, now most crypto investors disagree with it and get mad if you make similar points--they are heavily invested in 'neobanks', custodial stablecoins, and other centralized cooptions of 'crypto' & they're not wrong for finding some value there--surprisingly, the "bullshit" identified by Andreas has become a bit useful & is causing a lot of confusion about how to build in crypto and what the ultimate value prop of crypto is. How can this be? Doesn't it mean that actually "the self-sovereign crypto thesis is disproven" and instead some new "fintech thesis" has been proven? Doesn't it mean that "crypto is just some new rails for finance" and you just need to accept this? I say, no. But then I am left to explain 'okay so why is all the 'bullshit' actually thriving'? i.e., why is it not actually "bullshit" but actually has some value? My personal framework for understanding this phenomenon revolves around two reasons/causes: (1) -->private-key infrastructure (PKI) is actually a pretty useful, direct, app auth technology, even if the app is a centralized fintech app -->the "crypto UX" is a pretty good UX for finance--look at your "wallet" and see what assets are "in it" and press a button to do stuff with them, even if those assets are centralized -->crypto wallets with the two above features are widely distributed and so it makes sense to build even very centralized fintech things that use them as the auth & delegate some aspects of UX & functionality to them so that every small fintech startup doesn't have to independently build something similar all of these things can be largely independent of "blockchain" and the self-sovereign/cypherpunk uses of "blockchain", you get the same auth and the same UX and the same distribution even if, when all is said and done, there is some centralized fintech company or monopolistic "institution" that can 100% rug you / censor you / deplatform you at any time there is real value in all the PKI and 'crypto UX' and tooling, as a form of path dependence & non-wheel-reinvention, even if it otherwise doesn't 'make sense' because this stuff was built for decentralization and autonomy in the first place & if designing a *centralized* finance system from scratch, you'd probably just use servers and open APIs instead of blockchains (2) An additional reason the "bullshit" (as Andreas called it) can seem or be useful is a 'halo effect' or what one might even see as a kind of cuckoo-bird strategy aka "brood parasitism" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_par…). Regulators/legislators are *not* very good at distinguishing between centralized and decentralized "crypto", so currently there is a legal arbitrage "halo effect" where something that has "crypto flavor" can get the same beneficial regulatory treatment as "real crypto". . .this naturally leads to a "just build a good product using crypto" mindset as in the short term it appears you can "unlock" all kinds of interesting things by just putting it in a "crypto format" even if it's not decentralized/autonomous. The problem is the "unlocks" are not some new structural legal workaround but simply law-breaking in a specific format. Likewise, it just so happens that right now it is politically unpopular to prosecute law-breaking if it happens to occur in a "crypto format". So, personally I believe this is a temporary phenomenon--it's an arb that exploits a time-limited vuln in regulator psychology rather than tying into deep policy rationales that might ultimately get embraced by society as a fair way to draw legal perimeters. To see this, check how crypto market structure legislation is shaping up--it's still based on the idea that a token with its value coming from a decentralized autonomous system presents different trust issues than a security, which should drive a difference in regulation and *can* do so without simply becoming a functional abrogation of the legal system ("different risks, different rules" is the corollary of "same risks, same rules"). It turns out this kind of principled reasoning is the only way Dems and Republicans can align on a fair way to regulate crypto, and there's probably good reason for that (i.e., it probably *is* a fair way). I am still here building & supporting the real stuff as are a bunch of others, because I still believe crypto builder principles (best embodied here imo chaser.eth.link/nikolais-princ…) can lead to significant value beyond the conveniences of mere 'composability on a blockchain'. It's just the timelines for this outperforming have been dramatically lengthened and so you will continue to see a lot of depression/skepticism/crashouts as you simply cannot get rich off the real stuff on any kind of short timeline and you can get very rich off of the "bullshit" on short timelines. Personally, I think everyone in crypto should probably be pursuing a mix of both, as they do synergize to some extent, but we must never lose sight of the end-game as without the cypherpunk fundamentals, as irrelevant as they might currently appear, the 'other stuff' would collapse from the weight of its own psyops. . .all of that stuff is dependent on halo effect and cuckoo bird strategy re: the 'real' crypto. . .

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