This is part 2 of the "How Crypto can cross the chasm" series. See the first part here

The first step to crossing the chasm isn't infrastructure or UX improvements, it's getting enough people to care. Most things never cross the chasm into mainstream usage, because most things aren't useful to mainstream society, so why is crypto any different?

My overarching theory: Crypto democratizes wealth creation. It allows more people to invest in far more things, which gives creators access to more investors to more easily become wealthy from their talents.

Today you can invest in stocks, some ETFs, a house (which you have to buy one at a time). Maybe baseball cards, gold, or art if you're really esoteric. In a blockchain native world everything can be financialized - every game, movie, band, toy, building, company, product. Everything!

Crypto at it's full potential can allow anyone anywhere to invest in anything anywhere, as well as agree on investment terms and details up front, and permanently etch them online so everyone knows what they're agreeing to.

All of Crypto's most successful use cases were aligned with this - ICO's, DeFi, NFT's, DePIN and Memecoins. These had issues with scams and excessive jubilance, but the problem wasn't lack of wealth or investing desire, there were simply too many investors chasing too few good projects. This is a good thing! It shows there is appetite for this and not enough creators taking advantage of it.

If we cross the chasm into a world where all kinds of creators are building products and using crypto to allow anyone to invest and participate we'll be in a much better place.

Crypto is participatory finance

For most of human history there was zero participation in wealth creation, you were born into it or not. Since the enlightenment age some people with skills and connections could build a company that creates wealth, but most normal folk can only passively invest in big established companies. Most employees and workers receive no benefit when the company they work for grows in value. They also aren't able to invest at the earliest stages when a company needs funds the most, or have much influence over the outcome of their investment.

With Crypto you have direct ability to influence your wealth, and contribution is encouraged. You don't need coding skills, exceptional talent or management ability to improve your wealth. You can be a community member who evangelizes or connects with other fans, or a hipster who has an eye for new trends before the rest of the world realizes, and you'll grow your own wealth while supporting the things you enjoy.

This is also why DePIN and staking rewards are such powerful concepts. Projects no longer need to raise millions of dollars and hire thousands of employees to build out a network of nodes to power a service. Instead they can issue a token to reward participants and grow organically from people wanting to contribute, and everyone wins together.

The rise of the Indie Investor

Isn't it weird you can put $10 into a stock but you generally can't be an angel investor for less than $5k? This is an effect of legacy systems which have too many costs and overheads to allow for thousands or millions of early investors. Crypto unlocks pre-angel micro investing. This is the rise of the indie investor.

Most of these projects won't have venture scale returns, and many will fail, but this is totally fine, because this additional capital will help plenty succeed where it wasn't previously possible. Through the democratization of investing we're going to see a lot more creative experiments in the world and a lot more people helping push them through the early stages when the going is tough and most companies fail.

It's company evolution on steroids, where we have a pool of millions of experiments happening every day, the best ones succeed and attract attention and capital, and the rest fade away. But this model of democratized wealth will give 100x more people the chance to build something great than they were able to before.

I work at BlueYard Capital, a Venture Capital firm, why am I advocating for this open access to investing? Won't this hurt our returns?

BlueYard operates at the seed and pre-seed stage of investing, and our minimum check size is $500k. It would be extremely beneficial for us to have more companies survive to this stage of growth and have a more passionate community and investor base behind them when they do. We'd also like to work with the best indie investors to help companies they believe are great get to the next level, it's a win-win setup.

Is this all Crypto Unlocks?

There are still plenty of other potential activities cryptocurrencies can enhance, but being able to invest and participate in wealth creation and have it tie in with the things you do in your every day life is a big shift in society and could easily take crypto across the chasm all by itself.

If you're working on platforms that enable anything mentioned above, allowing peer to peer investments or open participation, I'd love to have a chat! You can reach me at tim@blueyard.com or ping me on Twitter / Farcaster/ Telegram at @timjrobinson