There’s a saying that if you’re not embarrassed by the things you did 6 months ago, you’re not growing fast enough. 2024 has certainly been a hard year, hard both in terms of the challenges we’ve tackled, and also the lessons we learned along the way. I have learned a lot as a builder, and this article is some of my reflections on these hard earned lessons.

Studying the best:

The most active blockchains in the world (Tron, Solana and Hype) all have one thing in common. They are all home to at least one use case that has real users and the user base is large enough to cross the chasm. The chain is optimized for the use case, and the use case is well suited to the blockchain. The former two chains found the use case years after the initial launch, and after many iterations. The latter was built by a team with deep insights in a business area and built UX / chain feature with trade offs that are suitable for this set of users.

Embracing the weird and the new:

The next new use case is hard to predict. No one could have predicted what Facebook look like before it happened. The unique use case for scroll is yet to be discovered, but we need to work hard to increase our chance of discovering this, creating this, or making it happen on Scroll. The strategy we have so far comes down to doing the following things:

a) the Founder to Founder Play

Founder > Dapps > Users

When we have great founders in the ecosystem, they build great Dapps and Dapp brings in users, the growth loop compounds. When founders support other founders, ideas pollinate, information spreads faster, everyone grows a little faster. The initial set of founders are always acquired through ways that are not scalable, through building relationships, being a co-builder, maybe even building out parts of the product ourselves. Whatever it takes.

b) Building Culture and Lore

When a group of people gather, culture naturally forms. For Dapp builders, we want to seed a culture around product first thinking, bias towards action, user centric thinking, shipping fast, getting in front of the first 100 users, building in the open, peer to peer direct feedback etc. Whenever I think about the founder roller coaster, I’m reminded of the Harry Potter books, in which a group of friends take on monsters much bigger than their weight class, they get burned, get better, then they relax with a hot chocolate at the end of every book with bruises and scars. Every builder should be going after the big game, and we want to build a culture to encourage that.

c) Building Mindshare and Brand

The CT is a very busy place for attention, but outside of the crypto bubble very few chains stand out. 2025 is going to be the hockey stick year for new adoption, net new users. Taking inspiration from Gary Vanerchuck, Alex Hormozi, and Seth Godin. We want to build a brand beyond crypto. This involves data guided organic content creation, optimized for different platforms, and building a brand around personality, authenticity and the builder first culture we just talked about. We want to be the default destination and friend for founders on their web3 journey.

d) One founder at a time. Ride or Die.

More focus on supporting Scroll only founders and creating tools and support mechanisms to increase their chance of success. The moment of critical mass for this play is when founders in our ecosystem organically and proactively onboards other founders. We are a little bit away from this, but we are hoping to get there by the second half of the year.

“One punch at a time, one step at a time, one game at a time.” - Creed.

3. Keeping our tech edge, and staying Open

Staying competitive on the technical front is key to our brand and identity, and we want to continue doing so in 2025. Embracing open source culture which means more competition, more collaboration, no vendor lock in, more permission-less build out is the world we want to live in.

4. Being the Weird Chain

The tech meta has shifted from 12 months ago. The age of the general purpose rollup is over. Soon speed, throughput and latency will become table stakes too. The survivors of the future will be ones that focuses on a specialized application, and has specialized chain features to support and retain the successful applications. What chain features do the Dapps need? What Dapps are needed to utilize certain chain features, these are chicken and egg problems we will have to quickly iterate on and find some answers. Our research team is cooking up a lot of weird and wonderful chain feature ideas as fast as our ecosystem founders can churn out use cases. When the two meet, it will be magical!

Things I want to work on in the next 12 months:

• Be laser focused on creating value for the user;

• Focus on unique use cases that has never been done before;

• Be more vocal and build in the open;

• Be laser focused on creating better UX for end users;

• Build a team culture described in this article “seek and destroy”. https://bradfordcross.com/seek-and-destroy/

The scene is set and our work is laid out for us. The sky's the limit and everything depends on execution from here on. I’m grateful to be on this entrepreneurial journey, and I’m grateful for the possibility of doing meaningful work and creating impact.

In the spirit of building in the open, I will be writing more and sharing my thoughts as we build on Substack. If you haven’t subscribed already please do so. More rambles to come…

There’s a saying that if you’re not embarrassed by the things you did 6 months ago, you’re not growing fast enough. 2024 has certainly been a hard year, hard both in terms of the challenges we’ve tackled, and also the lessons we learned along the way. I have learned a lot as a builder, and this article is some of my reflections on these hard earned lessons.

Studying the best:

The most active blockchains in the world (Tron, Solana and Hype) all have one thing in common. They are all home to at least one use case that has real users and the user base is large enough to cross the chasm. The chain is optimized for the use case, and the use case is well suited to the blockchain. The former two chains found the use case years after the initial launch, and after many iterations. The latter was built by a team with deep insights in a business area and built UX / chain feature with trade offs that are suitable for this set of users.

Embracing the weird and the new:

The next new use case is hard to predict. No one could have predicted what Facebook look like before it happened. The unique use case for scroll is yet to be discovered, but we need to work hard to increase our chance of discovering this, creating this, or making it happen on Scroll. The strategy we have so far comes down to doing the following things:

a) the Founder to Founder Play

Founder > Dapps > Users

When we have great founders in the ecosystem, they build great Dapps and Dapp brings in users, the growth loop compounds. When founders support other founders, ideas pollinate, information spreads faster, everyone grows a little faster. The initial set of founders are always acquired through ways that are not scalable, through building relationships, being a co-builder, maybe even building out parts of the product ourselves. Whatever it takes.

b) Building Culture and Lore

When a group of people gather, culture naturally forms. For Dapp builders, we want to seed a culture around product first thinking, bias towards action, user centric thinking, shipping fast, getting in front of the first 100 users, building in the open, peer to peer direct feedback etc. Whenever I think about the founder roller coaster, I’m reminded of the Harry Potter books, in which a group of friends take on monsters much bigger than their weight class, they get burned, get better, then they relax with a hot chocolate at the end of every book with bruises and scars. Every builder should be going after the big game, and we want to build a culture to encourage that.

c) Building Mindshare and Brand

The CT is a very busy place for attention, but outside of the crypto bubble very few chains stand out. 2025 is going to be the hockey stick year for new adoption, net new users. Taking inspiration from Gary Vanerchuck, Alex Hormozi, and Seth Godin. We want to build a brand beyond crypto. This involves data guided organic content creation, optimized for different platforms, and building a brand around personality, authenticity and the builder first culture we just talked about. We want to be the default destination and friend for founders on their web3 journey.

d) One founder at a time. Ride or Die.

More focus on supporting Scroll only founders and creating tools and support mechanisms to increase their chance of success. The moment of critical mass for this play is when founders in our ecosystem organically and proactively onboards other founders. We are a little bit away from this, but we are hoping to get there by the second half of the year.

“One punch at a time, one step at a time, one game at a time.” - Creed.

3. Keeping our tech edge, and staying Open

Staying competitive on the technical front is key to our brand and identity, and we want to continue doing so in 2025. Embracing open source culture which means more competition, more collaboration, no vendor lock in, more permission-less build out is the world we want to live in.

4. Being the Weird Chain

The tech meta has shifted from 12 months ago. The age of the general purpose rollup is over. Soon speed, throughput and latency will become table stakes too. The survivors of the future will be ones that focuses on a specialized application, and has specialized chain features to support and retain the successful applications. What chain features do the Dapps need? What Dapps are needed to utilize certain chain features, these are chicken and egg problems we will have to quickly iterate on and find some answers. Our research team is cooking up a lot of weird and wonderful chain feature ideas as fast as our ecosystem founders can churn out use cases. When the two meet, it will be magical!

Things I want to work on in the next 12 months:

• Be laser focused on creating value for the user;

• Focus on unique use cases that has never been done before;

• Be more vocal and build in the open;

• Be laser focused on creating better UX for end users;

• Build a team culture described in this article “seek and destroy”. https://bradfordcross.com/seek-and-destroy/

The scene is set and our work is laid out for us. The sky's the limit and everything depends on execution from here on. I’m grateful to be on this entrepreneurial journey, and I’m grateful for the possibility of doing meaningful work and creating impact.

In the spirit of building in the open, I will be writing more and sharing my thoughts as we build on Substack. If you haven’t subscribed already please do so. More rambles to come…