Everything Is Crypto Now

Crypto has always been different. Most industries (ie tech in Silicon Valley, finance on Wall Street, etc) all have a certain style, standard, culture, or decorum that rhymes across all of them. They're often led by people that come from similar places (ie Stanford, Harvard, etc) and so it's no wonder they all have a certain feel to them.

But not crypto. The origins of crypto -- bottoms up, anonymous, and ragtag nature of early people -- meant there were no rules. Plus the global, 24x7, and open philosophy of crypto meant that crypto culture originated from anywhere, anytime, and spread everywhere instantly. Everything about crypto was unique. Our values (wagmi, hfsp), how we built/ran companies (protocols, daos), who our heroes were (hayes, cz), etc. Even our language is different.

Now you are seeing crypto culture show up everywhere. Simple things like foundations (openai, openclaw), discord / community (midjourney), even the just the word "token" (Ribbit's Token Letter). But also less good things like hollow logo x logo announcements (openai x oracle), fake/botted metrics, coordinated influencer/KOL campaigns on Twitter, etc.

I remember when all the AI companies started to rip the crypto startup fundraise announcement where you list every investor on a card like it's a flyer for a music festival. And then many crypto native fundraise things like raising multiple rounds at different prices all at the same time, summing up total raise on announcement vs. latest raise amount, announcing valuation vs. raise amount, etc also started showing up.

And it's not just AI startups. The financial markets also seem to have become crypto. We saw a hint of this a few years ago with memestocks like AMC, GME, etc. But now huge companies are partnering with random celebs to pump their price (shoutout Sydney Sweeney), markets / companies have full ported narrative over fundamentals, and most notably public equities and even things like Gold, Silver, Copper, etc all went insane and started trading like shitcoins.

Ironically one of things least like crypto now is crypto. We're now openly working with governments on regulation, encouraging more and more TradFi folks to come in, etc. We also seem to care less than ever about the original principles of crypto -- permissionless, trustless, censorship resistant technology. We've gone from trying to eliminate the middlemen to not only welcoming them in and but hoping they actually save us.

I'm not yet sure if this is good or bad. While it certainly feels bad at times, I think it's probably a good thing. Crypto is influencing things outside of crypto and expanding beyond our small, isolated world. This gives us the opportunity to not only upgrade the rails of the world, but also define how all of it works. We can do this in the way that made crypto great (open, global, bottoms up), or replicate the old thing on new rails. Hopefully we don't squander it.