> Necessity is a mother of invention but unfortunately, there has been an abundance of capital that optimizes for short-term games (of marking up) and a healthy supply of savvy founders who know how to play the VC Keynesian beauty contest. There has been no necessity and no real innovation trigger in the past two years. Wat. We now have consumer crypto apps and much higher rates of adoption for L2s, better wallets, etc. Surprising to me how the author sees this as „no real innovation trigger.“
No surely there has been a lot of innovation the last two years. But I do agree with: > The idea of crypto "cycles" needs to be destroyed altogether for crypto … But for another reason. The idea of crypto having cycles, like the seasons, is a kind of investors hopium. I think there are ‘periods’, or maybe epochs to stay in crypto terminology, changing with quite sudden paradigm shifts in an evolutionary system. Seeing crypto as something evolutionary instead of some cyclical might lead to another, and here I agree with the author, less short term mindset and being more realistic that crypto is slowly building and it will take quite some time before we can actually see and fully enjoy what has been created.
Actually, on that note, I‘ve been there for 2-3 cycles and the funny thing is that cycle beginnings always coincited with technology break throughs. Matterlabs solved rollup-based scaling with zkSync right around last time. Before that we mainstreamed tokens and Ethereum launched. And before that people discovered that Bitcoin was way more useful than just for storing claims to money. It‘s actually not necessary to believe in cycles in the way that they‘re happening „after every halving.“ Instead, you can also believe that roughly every 3-4 years the scene manages to refresh the software to capture more value and that investors change their expectations because of that. So far this has been true. I timed Kiwi with that maturation cycle in mind, and I did so because I didn‘t know what to do with the fiat… Surely there are many like me