Welcome to your weekend Focus Fam ❤️

Participated in a call yesterday with over 20+ crypto founders and ecosystem leaders, many familiar names. Here's some takeaways:

• The general mood and sentiment was awful. Somehow it's worse than 2022 (when FTX crashed) and the bank runs that followed the year after.

• Everyone is struggling on adoption and acquisition right now. Many feel the exhaustion of the "pumpfun" cycle which sucked away a lot of attention from the market and liquidity which mostly exchanged hands between existing crypto mercenaries (not much new retail onboarded). There seems to be growing consensus that this problem will only continue to get worse as the friction to launching new tokens and chains (Memecoins, L2s, L3s) will grow and exchanges will continue to feast on them and ignore actual useful projects.

  
  Here's a great article from Andrew Chen recently about marketing channels (not specific to crypto but inherited by any tech company or project):

  https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/every-marketing-channel-sucks-right

• ETH/BTC price action seems to be a core driver of sentiment, as it causes people to reflect on whether they should've just held BTC this entire time or try to play the game of guessing the bottom. 

• Ethereum is still seen as the leading indicator of where projects go to thrive, and Solana seems to be where the mercenary projects go to live and die given how fast liquidity circulates to the next quick pump. Pretty much every other chain hasn't made real noise other than the L1 premium of being "new" like BeraChain and HyperLiquid.

• What I found interesting is that pretty much nobody makes revenue in this industry unless you're middleware like running validator nodes for foundations. So the only way to sustain is by launching a token and selling it which is unsustainable, especially because Exchanges & Market Makers dictate token flow and can also take a huge chunk of runway.
  
  It's unclear how many projects will survive another 4 years, overall funding and developer adoption is trending downwards, not upwards.

  https://app.artemisanalytics.com/developer-activity

  https://defillama.com/raises

• The thing most people are bullish on is regulatory clarity of non-speculative things like ETFs and Stablecoins. But this only attracts sophisticated capital, whereas for "marketing", most crypto projects need to attract degen liquidity which is highly unreliable.

Overall, it's interesting hearing from everyone else who are behind the scenes. I think this is a tough moment for crypto in terms of where to go, but hopefully a phoenix will rise from the ashes.

My biggest bearish takeaway is that I don't think the market is still close to valuing utility over speculation sadly, as so many people seem to be hurting from 2021-2024 losses, such that betting on speculation seems even more attractive in order to regain the losses (lose 9 hands, catch one 100x hand).

My biggest bullish takeaway is that I think people will still find ways to be resilient and survive this trend, and I still believe the ultimate crypto market cap will be the lagging indicator of how much value capture there will be — my bet is still in the double-digit trillions.

Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY April 2, 2025 📷 by @elrickerikose #photography #coneyisland #brooklyn #photographer #photosemotions

Prompting as a skill doesn’t make sense to me. Wouldn’t we just end up using AI to prompt AI?

Welcome to a beautiful day!