In the ICO era, the only way to get a coin tradeable was to get it listed on centralized exchanges. Once uniswap and other dex launched, it became much easier to launch a new token. Now you only needed assets for liquidity and did not need to raise funds for marketing and listing.
Defi farming took it even further by paying users tokens for providing dex liquidity, this additional step meant that a project of interest to users did not even need to acquire assets directly for liquidity but instead could rely on its userbase.
Defi 2.0 tech took this further by solving the primary issue of defi which was runs on liquidity. The key term is “POL” that is Protocol owned liquidity. Many experiments failed but today most tokens that successfully launch and are more than a flash in the pan use some variant of POL.
Well played.
As best I can tell, the value props were 90%+ "more efficient crypto", "more decentralized crypto", "more private crypto". I think Compound had a different mechanism for rewarding validators, but even that's just fiddling with the finances of the network.
I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets, and there's FileCoin for distributed storage.
I tried asking Bard for more, and didn't get much, but ChatGPT-4 gave me a bunch: Golem ("decentralized supercomputer by allowing users to rent out their idle computing power to others"), Basic Attention Token (Brave's thing for fixing ads/micro-transactions, Chainlink ("decentralized oracle network that allows smart contracts to access data from external sources"), Siacoin ("Users can rent out their unused hard drive space to store encrypted files for others, in exchange for Siacoin"), Augur ("decentralized prediction market platform"), and Decentraland ("users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications"???)
Don't get me wrong, it makes sense that cryptocurrency's use-cases are mostly financial, but there was a lot of energy, much of it honest in this space. I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out), rather than just the thousand's "it's all a scam" dismissal. Golem and Filecoin/Siacoin both sound like they might actually solve real problems / create rel value.
Most of those "novel ways" either make no sense or make trivial things hard and hard things nearly impossible. Most people peddling (there's no other word for it) these solutions have no idea how the real world works, or what the real world needs.
> I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out)
6 years ago these two articles already described how many "novel ways" make no sense, no matter the intention. All the issues described remain, regardless of how many new buzzwords people come up with in the crypto space:
- https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
- https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
For newer descriptions of how these systems fail, see Molly White: https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/ (and other essays and talks)
Edit: There's also The Edited Latecomer's Guide To Crypto https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-c...
As to "there's no middleman": there is. The person who wrote the NFT's "smart contract".
a) Having cool technology was enough to get rich; b) An ICO was a quick way to raise big money without government "interference" because the tech was so new that it was not covered under existing laws or regulations; c) They didn't really need a great product, they just needed to make it look good until being acquired.
I also noticed that when I told them their assumptions were faulty, they stopped paying any attention.
It seems likely that most of these people are now either in jail, or working (unless recently laid off) as marketing flaks at some tech company other than their own.
The lessons have, for some of us, been hard learned. But people do learn.
Filecoin for data storage.
Augur the decentralized prediction platform.
Numerai the hedge fund.
Genuinely asking because it’s the only one of these which could be familiar to someone who’s not deeply into crypto.
I wonder how the secondary market works. It’s convenient for Brave to pay you in BAT for watching ads. Then you probably want to convert those BAT earnings to money since this is a token with no obvious reason to appreciate (as the price history shows). Who’s buying ad-earned BAT at 29 cents and why? Does Brave pay for market-making?
Is it Brave themselves buying the tokens or paying a market maker? That would complete the loop you describe where the token is simply a way for them to pay semi-anonymously.
Brave does not buy the token or pay any market maker, it's a simple cycle between advertisers and viewers.
A combination of most being rug pulls and scams, some of their inventors and advertisers getting into trouble with the law, and the Fed turning off the free money spigot as a consequence of the Ukraine war.
> And why is nobody doing ICOs right now?
IIRC, that one is because securities regulators have caught up with reality and threaten to bring the hammer down on people thinking they can escape securities laws by "technicialities".
> Were any of the startups that did that successful?
Not that I'm aware of. The only successes were had by early investors dumping their shares onto gullible bag holders.
I would love to hear from a crypto fan, which was the most successful ICO? And where is it today?
Quite a few legitimate organizations raised money via ICOs. The most notable being Brave and Ethereum.
In terms of real-world use cases - I am familiar with and excited about WindingTree. https://windingtree.com/
They are building a platform to make the distribution of travel products (hotel rooms, flights and more) - arguably digital tokens with real-world value - more inclusive.
They did an ICO with a token called LIF that I bought at that time (not to dump later, but because I could identify with the problem and wanted to support them)
It is more common now for a project to distribute tokens after it has a running product to incentivise early users and integraters. ICO's still happen but are oftne restricted to venture capitalists and registered investors.
Citation needed.
It was painful to watch how many people you think should know better fall for the most basic schemes.
Where they belong.
Crypto is an ecosystem, complete with full-on darwinism, where worthy things survive and failed experiments wither away.
Meanwhile: BTCUSD @ 28.06k [1]
Turns out few, if any, had any breakthrough or worthwhile technology