I AM BULLISH
Because new cool stuff is coming soon
Earlier this week, I tweeted that I hadn't felt this bullish on Crypto for a long, long time.
If you read CT, you'd likely think the world was ending, that there's no one here, or that Crypto is doomed forever.
However, if you look closely at the recent trends and hold your hands over your ears when the scarred, jaded people from the last cycle whine about how the entire space is a scam, it's possible to see the light.
We've now seen two mobile apps start to gain some level of success and traction that are wildly different from what we saw in the previous cycle: Friend Tech and Blackbird.
I've written about Friend Tech extensively, so I won't discuss that again here, but I will briefly touch on Blackbird.
Blackbird is an app developed by the founder of Resy and Eater.
The idea behind it is that you download a membership NFT-type thing for restaurants in your area.
When you visit the restaurant, you tap your phone and receive perks depending on the number of visits you've made. For example, maybe on your second visit, you get a free coffee, or on your third, you receive a dessert. By your fifth visit, maybe the meal is entirely free.
Of course, we've seen this in the real world with chains offering rewards and perks, but this is the first time we've really seen it done at scale on a blockchain.
You also receive Blackbird tokens for each paid visit you make, with the restaurant earning tokens too.
What's cool about this is that it takes an already proven mechanism that works and improves upon it by adding network and social effects via the addition of a token.
As we've seen in Crypto land, adding token incentives can supercharge growth, so I'm excited to see what happens when we apply this to actual real-world projects, not just Ponzi yield farms and dog coins.
Here's some quick maffs I posted in my FT when I was trying to figure out if it was worth my time to book a hotel in New York (wtf are New York hotels like a trillion dollars) plus some flights, simply to farm Blackbird and get paid to eat out four times a day for a week.
It would most likely be overwhelmingly worth it.
(NFA I would never suggest spending thousands of dollars to run around a city eating probably very bad for you food in the hope of financial gain, this is dumb and probably does not work, ignore everything I am saying)
Anyway, what I predict we will start to see, and why I am SO SO SO BULLISH on the next cycle, is that a ton of apps like this will start to emerge.
Couple this with Base chain and an easy onboarding mechanism for new users, and I'm more confident than ever that the next cycle will bring abundant opportunities.
I went on a bit of a rant about this in the Monad Discord, but I think the world is wide open now for people to create innovative and exciting new applications.
But what I am most interested in is the social dynamics and economic game theoretical effects of adding Crypto technology to web 2.0 success stories.
Will we see huge levels of mass adoption or just repeat the bubbles of the past? Either way, it'll be best to embrace and use every new development rather than shouting at it from a distance or telling everyone how rubbish it is.
An example could be a location-based game similar to Pokemon Go where each week there is treasure hidden across the world. You need to visit the location on your phone to unlock it. Upon opening the treasure chest, a random prize is given to you. This could be ETH, it could be an NFT, it could be in-game items that give you extra powers or perks, or it could be tokens from other blockchains that want to promote themselves.
Imagine the viral effects of on a random Monday someone discovers there is treasure outside of a random Walmart in Ohio. Suddenly, you see hundreds of people outside on their phones. One of them wins a Pudgy Penguin NFT, and another wins 3 ETH.
How many people would download the app and go hunting for the next treasure chest?
Imagine each user could add their own treasure to the map? You could drop your hidden folder NFTs in your local park and check back to see if someone has come to claim it.
How many projects would get involved? Would Solana add their own treasure chests or drop random SOL tokens across the world for people to find as a marketing spend?
Would Dingaling or Pranksy pay the app developers to build Pranksy Castle? A location users could travel to and spin a wheel to win one of their NFTs?
Anyway, that's just one of my many dumb ideas for an app that could work. If I'm able to think of things like this, imagine what some smart people can come up with.
That is why I'm so excited for the next cycle. Cool stuff is coming.
I'm sure of it!