This has „New Paradigm!“ vibes on the Gartner Hype cycle. And it isn‘t intellectually consistent. To take the last bottom of Doge and then say, therefore it has fundamental value, to me it is non-viable longer term. What if the last bull market from 2020 is still lasting and so those like Yuga with their inflated expectations simply haven‘t been washed out yet?
In the last few months, I saw many people on CT writing about a more philosophical layer of memecoins. All of them feel like "bull run vibes" to me. On the other hand, I find this 'financial nihilism' angle interesting. Many people - even those with decent salaries - indeed feel like the game is rigged. I saw some stats showing that gambling's popularity is growing, and memecoins are basically lottery tickets for Gen Y & Z. In the long run, though, there needs to be some bubble burst.
100%, I mean even you and me probably made a significant amount of money just from aping into memecoins while this product that we‘ve built for over a year now is struggling with user activity. Why is that? It‘s because for a crypto product to be useful to „fit“ the market at the moment, it has to exhibit one of two traits: 1. It‘s simply a memecoin, first and foremost (DEGEN) 2. It‘s an actually useful product but it serves memecoin traders (Interface or specific Farcaster channels). Now, the impulse as the leader of Kiwi News is: To make our product „market-fit,“ we obviously start catering to memecoins too. This can either be done by featuring memecoin content, creating a memecoin niche, or by launching our own memecoin or partnering with one. An alternative would be to give up under the pressure of missing market fit. A way to think about it is that we just messed it up and that the market is going to stay memecoin-hungry, which means we can basically scrap Kiwi News and start a new project another time. But reflecting on how I behaved in the past, I actually feel like the value is with sticking very closely with our conviction and our product vision despite the market‘s momentaneous hysteria. We know that we have built something of value. I personally know that an HN for crypto is useful. Yes, it needs tweaking, no question, but the core value proposition is timeless and was encoded by all the user interview iterations we have done for over a year. Think about it, for a longer time have we developed features into Kiwi News through user feedback than the market has flipped „memecoin-bullish!“ Which means it will eventually flip back too, and make using our product more valuable again too. This time I rather wanna overstay our position than leaving it early.
+1. I also think that even during the bull run, people will get tired of the neverending memecoin FOMO - I already am, tbh. And then, the Kiwi lighthouse can guide them to a safe shore of long-term value. Also, given the infrastructure upgrades and growing adoption, I think 2024 is the year when we can finally break through this vicious circle of speculation. Linkrel: https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/speculation-market-fit-trap