You Will Also Miss Out on the Next Big Thing

Introduction

I have no idea whether it is going to be the drive behind the next big boom and bust in the blockchain space, but I can tell you what I am seeing an awful lot of these days.

Every project wants to release its own blockchain.

An L2 chain, an L0 chain, and some even claim they have a viable use case for an L1. I am not sure many of them even really know what "layer" means in this context.

I'll also tell you what all of this reminds me of. All the previous blockchain manias.

Hint: you can learn stuff from history

Coins

Cryptocurrencies started to do well in 2015, and there were suddenly plenty of software libraries and even websites out there that allowed you to easily deploy your own blockchain purely for the purpose of instantiating your own coin. Provided it was just a copy of yet another blockchain.

And so I started getting calls asking me, "Could you work for us on releasing a variant of Bitcoin we have dreamed up in our brilliance, only better. With a better transaction per second rate, and it's also better because people can store lots of data on it, and it will have better ASIC resistance. It's better."

I don't think any of them went anywhere significant.

Tokens

Then ICOs with tokens were doing fantastically well. Release your own ERC20 token with just a few clicks, or if you want something even slightly different, hire a Solidity developer (or rather, someone who knows how to deploy a stock contract with Truffle or Hardhat) on Fiverr and get some junk back. Genius ideas like "a token for trees", or "a token for orthodontists" appeared.

Again my phone was ringing with lots of calls from people making lots of promises based on vast token allocations as payment, if only I could re-implement their disastrous first attempt properly the second time around, and add some differentiating bells and whistles if at all possible.

I don't think any of them went anywhere significant either.

Protocols

Onward to where the money flowed next, namely DeFi.

"We've got this great concept in which we propose a mash-up of Aave and Sushiswap, but on Matic, or is it Polygon now? With a bridge that we need coding to connect it to Binance Smart Chain. You know, for the yield farmers. And the Amish."

By this time I was starting to see a pattern. Yes, I'm that slow. It is the same pattern that drove people to migrate to California, then the Yukon, and then Alaska, all in search of gold that was already gone by the time they read the news and arrived there with the rest of the crowds.

NFTs

Non-fungible tokens started booming. They were great, because they were simple (except they weren't because they were ill-defined), and they were easy to explain because they were visual (except they weren't because although jpegs are visual, the NFT itself is just another record on a blockchain).

Time to release a Cryptopunks or Bored Apes clone! And I use the word clone, because it is a clone, even if you've used alligators or ducks instead of primates.

But guess what? By the time you thought of putting out an NFT collection and then actually did something about it, a thousand other people had already done so too. The occasional success that managed to grab the somewhat limited public attention kept that myth alive for almost a year, but once again it was more like buying a very expensive lottery ticket and then spending a lot of months trying to promote your ticket over everyone else's.

Metaverses

I thought the Metaverse might be next, and perhaps it was. The problem remains that nobody really knows what it is, what it is for, and it sure seems like it is a difficult thing to build. Which any triple-A game developer could have told you for free.

The crowds couldn't have a real shot at this one, because it was akin to finding out that there might be extensive gold deposits five hundred meters beneath the sea off the coast of the Chatham Islands. Do you have a personal submarine and deep-water diving suit? Didn't think so.

Chains

I have changed my mind though. I think the next thing is new blockchains, most of which are EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible. The argument given for that is that the developer community, smart contract templates, the wallets, and the tooling already exist, so there is all the support out there that you need to build a vibrant community of builders.

The real reason is that any reasonably computer-literate teenager can now fork a copy of Geth, pick a chain number, and configure it to be ever-so-different from and yet fundamentally-the-same as Ethereum. With some extra stuff bolted on to make it "domain" or "use-case" specific, because otherwise it would just be another one of those L2 chains launched ages ago to solve transaction costs/rates/parameter issues with Ethereum.

Most of which are going to be solved for Ethereum in the next five years anyway.

So what's an intrepid blockchain entrepreneur supposed to do then?

Learnings

Do you know where genuine success has been found? Support services. And it is so obvious. Everyone knows that the real profits during gold rushes were made by shovel manufacturers. And grocery stores, gambling halls, brothels, and bars.

The coin craze gave life to exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. Tokens and protocols supported the rise of end-point services like Infura and Alchemy, and analytics services like The Graph and Dune. NFTs spawned marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible.

And a horde of companies that will provide you with services such as software development, business advice, marketing, tech writing, compliance, forensics, and investment (yes, investment is a service - they aren't putting all their eggs in one basket).

Conclusion

There's a reason they call it gold fever. Shovels are boring, aren't they?