-kezfourtwez
gm gang things are looking up, BTC just made its first higher high in six months, we had our first rate cut and China is about to fire the liquidity bazooka. Obligatory ‘we aren’t out of the woods yet’, but global liquidity is growing and it’s got the general vibe feeling optimistic.
Speaking of optimism, I’m going to write some takeaways from token/breakpoint.
Crypto is an easy industry to get burnt out in, the sensory overload of keeping up with 263,562 projects of which many are vaporware or just a short term trade is exhausting. Exacerbated by the fact that we’ve had a relatively boring cycle so far in terms of breakout apps, new narratives and general PMF on anything new or potentially exciting.
But my first big conference has left me feeling energised and optimistic about the future of crypto, so some brief thoughts.
Breakpoint was more exciting. Token is a business, they connect retail with crypto products - ie. they sell tickets and booths, so you get a lot more vaporware and it gives parts of the conference a grifty sort of vibe.
Breakpoint is run by the Solana foundation, they probably sell booths too but they have more of an incentive to promote promising and nascent products/sectors. Which made it feel a lot more like they were just incubating and fostering good projects to showcase to the public.
What made me feel energised was the sheer number of attendees and the overall positive outlook, the venues were packed and the vibe was high. 20k tickets were sold for token compared to 10k this time last year. Both conferences were full of optimistic builders and that’s exactly what we need.
I didn’t know 95% of the projects at token, it made me realise how big the industry is, and reaffirmed that ours is just a small sub sector of crypto at large. We walked into an event for a random Asian CEX I’d never heard of. We got talking to a BD person and they told us some statistics about the exchange, one of which was that they have 2m users..? Now obviously these numbers get exaggerated or details left out to make it seem more impressive, but the point remains that crypto is a lot larger than it feels when you spend most of your time inside the CT bubble.
What I’m actually excited about:
I think the biggest unlocks this cycle are going to be high performant blockchains and UX improvements. Hyperliquid, MegaETH, Monad and Solana’s Firedancer aim to facilitate applications that weren’t possible last cycle - Real time blockchain interactions.
I’m not super vocal about it but I’m a massive Hyperliquid bull, meeting the team and a bunch of their ecosystem projects and participants only cemented that. There is already a passionate and solidified community, and there is a plethora of builders waiting to deploy applications on the EVM which is slated for Q4.
This time last year our fastest EVM’s had a TPS in the low double digits, Solana nearly 100x that but it was less reliable than it is now, and even then that sort of speed doesn’t facilitate a ‘real time’ blockchain servicing hundreds of apps and millions of users.
At the core of my bullishness on UX unlocks are companies like Turnkey and Privy. These infrastructure providers allow apps to safely outsource the creation and management of users private keys.
I’m not the guy that comes up with the app ideas, I’ve simply been spending time thinking about what needs to change to make crypto viable for your everyday person. Regular people don’t care about block times, whether EIP1559 makes ETH deflationary or not, and they certainly don’t want to have to manage their keys and jump through 6 hoops to get onchain. The reality is that for 99% of people not yet onboarded we need blockchains and apps that don’t feel like your using crypto at all.
The recipe for adoption is realtime blockchains with a UX that abstracts away the complexities of cryptography and wallets to the point where using a crypto app feels they way it should ...like using a regular app.
Take Moonshot for example, they’re all over the timeline the last couple of days because they created a simple app with fiat on/off ramping, that you can buy and sell tokens without signing a transaction. Makes you realise how bad the current UX is for something that should be so simple.