I think one of the fundamental issues with ex-Coinbase and current Coinbase employees, and with parts of the wider ecosystem, is that they carry a Silicon Valley mindset. They approach DeFi like a classical startup problem. And while I respect the vision of building a major non-financial consumer use case for crypto, we also need to face reality: today, building for crypto natives is more Las Vegas than San Francisco. And finance has always been the sticky, durable use case.
You cannot turn Vegas into SF. You have to be honest about who you’re building for.
If you’re building crypto-adjacent, not directly for crypto natives, then yes, you can bring a more utopian mindset to the table. Payments, stablecoins, tokenized assets, these are places where a “next 1B users” consumer use case could happen on a shorter timeline.
But if you’re building for crypto natives, you’re building for a relatively small subset of users who like to trade, gamble at high velocity, or collect items they can speculate on. That is a different customer, with different incentives, and a different product truth.
At Degen, two things with real staying power have been meme coins and the broader “degen” identity. Meme coins capture what it means to be crypto native, and the word “degen” describes that culture better than almost anything.
Building a brand for crypto natives can be huge business, but it’s not a tech-startup style of business. It’s closer to Nike. Nike sells a commodity. They did innovate on running shoes, and Bill Bowerman’s obsession mattered, especially for elite athletes, but wearing Nike versus another shoe was never an exponential advantage. Shoes remained a commodity. What made Nike into Nike was brand, distribution, and sales execution.
A lot of crypto-native business models will look more like traditional businesses than startup culture. They can be massive, even “billion-user” massive, but they don’t fit the SV mental model. SV types often treat storytelling as selling snake oil, when in reality storytelling is part of competition in markets where out-innovating is hard, and often not what customers want anyway.
How do you innovate on building a casino in Vegas? You mostly don’t. People like the same games. You win through positioning, entertainment, operations, and brand. So the real question is: are you building for the Vegas crowd, or the SF crowd?
If it’s the SF crowd, you’re usually talking about financial use cases, often backend infrastructure more than anything else. As for Farcaster, I still see the vision, but that’s a story of its own.
