Degens Are Pioneers

Degens, meaning crypto speculators, are the early adopters who make new crypto products viable, and the author argues that VCs who deride them are being intellectually dishonest or unfounded. The text says speculators were the first users of DeFi protocols, Helium hotspots and NFTs, and that degen activity battle-tested blockchains, rollups, wallets and bridges, prompting the industry to build safer, cheaper systems. It also says stablecoins were bootstrapped by degens, with USDT first used for cross-exchange arbitrage and DAI for leveraged trading, and that speculation is not crypto's only use case, citing Chainalysis data ranking India, Nigeria and Vietnam as the top three countries by adoption.