Reposting as everything is in shambles. Here's my view on crypto/blockchain and where things go from here...
Crypto/blockchain has to focus on solving real problems for people in their daily lives. The casino and extraction apps need to die. Here are the main use cases for crypto/blockchain I see:
* Commercial banking settlement. Stablecoins fix this, speed up everything, and soak up U.S. debt. New stats show commercial settlement is the primary use case by far, period.
* International payments. Already happening with Stellar and Base. You see far fewer “money changing” booths worldwide. This is now happening on phones.
* Providing banking to the “underbanked” and providing a functioning economic structure to developing nations. Think about everyday people picking themselves up from poverty or the aftermath of bad stuff happening in their country when the currency is useless.
* Funding sources and new biz models for creatives. Crowdsourcing and going direct-to-fan for sales and streaming will liberate musicians, filmmakers, and artists from media conglomerates and create an artistic middle class. You may not be famous but you’ll make a living. Also community development around artists is key (aka social and knowing who your fans are). Can’t do that on Spotify or Netflix. Total market size is about $230 BILLION A YEAR WITH A 25% ANNUAL GROWTH RATE for the next 10 years.
@baseapp.base.eth and
@zora abandoned this vision in January - a mistake iMHO. Hoping they'll reconsider.
* Royalty payments splits for all creative industries: book publishing, playwriting, songwriting, filmmaking, all have complex royalty settlements that result in money being lost in black boxes and multi month settlement. Smart contracts fix all of this. Again BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of payment processing opportunies here.
@base.base.eth and
@solana are best positioned to solve this with low fee structure.
* Small business marketplaces. Stripe and PayPal are not the only game in town. Think Etsy stores popping up for all kinds of niches. Product curation, ease of development, and community discussion (social feed) will create popularity.
* Prediction markets will be important, but again, these apps need to focus on solving real world problems: insurance, for example, or providing "confidence" around business decision-making as a factor, not the only factor. Otherwise, they're just gambling and why not head to Vegas in person and have more fun.
@farcaster can play a role in all of these by providing the tooling for these apps to be made easily and quickly.
@rish is right.
