Like many people coming into the crypto market in 2020-2021, I came in with incredibly high expectations of the technology, people, and upside. My thinking process was that it would likely not be easy to bring this technology to a very wide audience and that there were surely some years of hard work ahead, but that all together, the industry was on a trajectory that roughly approximates a linear growth curve. I wasn’t smart enough to understand that virtually nothing worth dedicating your life to is growing linearly, and I especially wasn’t smart enough to understand that out of all the exciting nascent technologies in the world, crypto is literally the farthest away from being that linear thing.

In practice this worldview resulted in me being focused on investing in tokens that are “real”. The way I separated between real tokens and non-real was by viewing tokens through the lens of traditional businesses. If a protocol could have a business model, with a product being served and revenue being generated, and a PnL that you could analyze, the corresponding token was real. If there was no such thing, and no prospect of having such things in the future, I would deem a token as being not real, and therefore not something I was interested in exploring or investing in.

That mental model works for understanding some things in crypto, such as defi tokens, starts to collapse when you apply it to most infrastructure tokens, and implodes the second that it is applied to meme coins. And what I’ve realized is that it is a bad mental model for understanding tokens, not only because it doesn’t generalize beyond niche token categories like defi, but because it fundamentally misreads what crypto is. Unless tokens have use cases with PMF in the real world, and unless the PMF for crypto protocols grows beyond servicing crypto’s internal circular PvP economy, tokens are memes. Because of that, 99.9% of tokens in existence are memes. Even your favorite infra and defi ones.

The industry desperately needs people to want to do things that are more than memes. We need to want to invest in them. The alternative is that crypto continues to degenerate and that we will all have spent our best years on building next gen internet casinos. Good enough to make money, but also psychological hell.