I got asked by Phil at Bright Moments to participate in Onchain—a collection of essays by various community members exploring everything and anything related to Onchain. I wrote an essay last year defining the concept, so I set out to write something more specific, comprehensive and long form (as was the brief).
Funnily enough, aiming to write something very specific, comprehensive and long has resulted in something very high level, somewhat incomplete and short.
Below is a list of high level statements, beliefs and predictions that relate to Onchain and to some extent crypto at large. A lot of them—if not all of them—are consensus, obvious and nothing new. Even so, I’ve found them personally potent and interesting to write out, so maybe they might be for others. I’ll probably add to this list over time.
Predictions:
- The majority of societal value will be onchain over the next decade.
- The majority of prices on the internet will move from fiat denominated to crypto denominated (and onchain).
- There will be things we already know to be valuable that transfer onchain—these will require scale and capital.
- There will be entirely new things that will reveal themselves to be valuable onchain—these will start as extremely weird and small.
- Memes are extremely valuable, and are an internet form of coordination and expression—they are a powerful combination of brand and community. There will be self propagating memes that see Dogecoin level returns (>$Bs).
- Memecoins start as entirely reflexive and self-referential. This is viable in the short term, however a threshold of adoption and/or utility does need to be crossed to become long term durable.
- Crypto is an alternative IP system in the same way it’s an alternative financial system. This means will see venture scale returns on the units of content, information and ideas themselves without the need for a corporate structure to capture that value. It will by and large make all IP publicly available and remixable by anyone.
- New virtual value systems will lead to new physical opportunities.
- Onchain fundamentally incentivizes the creation and realization of imagination—it starts with art, then Hollywood, and will then progress to social endeavors.
- Things that outperform ETH in the long term will have ETH cash flows. Things that outperform ETH in the short term will have outsized attention.
- Money as a technology is being unbundled. Uniswap is the medium of exchange, ETH is the store of value (and currently the unit of account). Memecoins will become the new unit/s of account. Each chain will have it's own set of those components.
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