It wasn’t all for nothing.

The market exploded, then it blew up. But it wasn't all for nothing, I promise.

You just take your USDC you lend it to compound, you earn $Comp and get a $cUSDC LP Token and then go on a 30 minute run with Stepn to earn $GST then you take the $GST and you sell it for $USDC and then you take your $USDC and $Comp and LP to bancor and get an LP token and $BNT subsidy rewards to mitigate the imperm then use the $BNT to sell for $USDC and then lend that to Compound and keep it going! Its fucking free money bro! You just gotta do it before asia wakes up so the gas fees dont fuck you.

Idk if that strategy actually was something that someone did, but that's how we all sounded for the last year or so. 

The term “Degen” could not have been more appropriately coined. 

But now the good days of degeneracy have come to a close. The bull(shit) market is over and the time of seemingly endless free cash for hopping through weird transaction flows is gone. We now collectively face the existential crisis. 

What the actual fuck did we just spend the last 2 years building? What was the point? What happened to the future of france? Will my bitcorns be worth anything? Will the merge ever happen? Why does the merge even matter? Did we all just build ponzis for eachother to play in? How much does mcDonalds pay?

But despite our collective crisis of existence, I want to make the case that it wasn’t all for nothing. That said, there is no doubt that this cycle hurt a lot of people. There is no doubt that all of the blowups had real world impact on actual human beings. But shit feels worse if it feels like it happened for nothing. 

…and I think this cycle wasn’t truly all a waste. So lemme explain:

Before there was defi, there was crypto, before there was crypto there was a blockchain and before the blockchain there were these super rad basement nerds called cypherpunks that believed that we could have this weird database thing that was permissionless and immutable, and that database thing could be a core piece of technology that enables a more equitable future. What i'm trying to say is that those ideals are what created this 24/7 degenerate casino that we call defi. But before we could hit the main stage and bring this big idea to the “real world” we first had to really test things out. We needed to build the discipline. We couldn’t really go do that from day one, or if we did, shit would move too slow. So we convinced ourselves that operating in this little bubble was the real world and we ran some fucking crazy simulations.

Sure the simulations were mostly connected to the “real world” by the “greater fool” theory of new value coming in because someone else was there to fall for the story that sold the last fool, but there was real potential for economic loss, and I don’t think any of us can say it didn’t “feel” real. 

We created systems with millions of dollars in hourly transaction volume, billions of dollars of value locked, automated multi billion dollar lending markets running on immutable contracts, liquidation ecosystems maintaining the health of the protocol collateralization, hell, we even had people creating incredibly complex financial exploitations targeting those same protocols. The fucking Lazarus group was playing in our sandbox! We had the battle test of all fucking battle tests.

Out of that we created an endless supply of seed capital for new ideas, a global coordination network for maintaining projects, a design language, hundreds of thousands of smart contract engineers, legal/regulatory frameworks, tooling for data visualization and much more… all built on top of that weird database thing that was permissionless and immutable.

We proved that it’s possible to have systems function on this technology. But now it’s our time to grow up. We just went through puberty, got kicked out of the house for doing crack and now we have a choice to reminisce about the last high or to become an adult. 

We know what to do and we have all the tools to do it. Its time to make a choice. 

Time to plug into the real world.

P.S. Some of us are already doing it. Checkout Goldfinch, TrueFi, Maple, Figure, USDC.homes, Baconcoin and if there are some i missed, lmk.