Like, HTTP isn't a product; but a web browser uses HTTP as a feature, and so do web servers. But they aren't the whole product either.
And the categorical error is that traditional finance sees its protocols as products, but they're actually on the road to commodified features. It's easy to "print new money" now, so that's not the part of the value chain that matters.
I used to say to proponents of blockchain as an enabling tech, "show me a product that relies on blockchain tech but sells itself on its amazing problem-solving features, not on the word blockchain and not on the alleged value of its attached tokens"
I don't know that I've really seen such a thing yet. I stopped asking a couple of years ago I think. The few times I got a response I'd follow a link and go to a page singing the praises of a token and using the word blockchain liberally.
But neither is anything particularly new at the consumer end, the only difference between Koala and any other company is that they're reliant on defi lending for their funding.
And the only thing blockchainy I can find about Figure is their crypto mortgage, which is an(other) collateralised loan scheme, and it's not in action yet. I notice it was supposed to launch in April with a 100% crypto-to-loan amount. I wonder if they've had to rethink it in light of the recent crash?
If their other products are somehow blockchain (and they might be, I can see they have some sort of proprietary blockchain going on) then firstly, yes, we’ll done to them for not crowing about it and putting the product first! But secondly, again I’m not really seeing a novelty here.
And I wonder what happens to companies like Koala in the current situation, a lot of DeFi lending platforms seem to have either collapsed or be on the brink.
But I guess “crowd-funded finance”
Why would I want to hitch my wagon to that star? What will happen if the speculation dies down and the ledger isn't so widely distributed anymore?
They will initially but just as we saw the the early internet, a crash can wipe out the speculation pretty efficiently and what remains might actually be useful.
Bitcoin has now been around for, what, 13 years? And aside from a very brief explosion of hype around NFTs that most people were fairly quickly able to recognize as nothing but more "greater fool" scams, most people not directly financially invested in blockchain projects either don't know or care blockchain exists, or see it as a bad thing.
Some stocks crashed, some specific sites went away, but the people involved just reorganized and made even more successful businesses.
If 50%+ of Internet users decided to disconnect that could cause some real problems.
The poster I was responding to thought that would make room for more pragmatic applications but I'm not so sure.
I'm not convinced that crypto is like the dot-com bubble. With the early web, its use cases were fairly clear and immediate. With crypto, the use cases remain unclear and speculative even after 13 years of hype and fanfare.
What is a non-speculative project? How can you deter speculation? By maintaining a high supply inflation for a long time?
This is a far better question to put to crypto.
The article isn’t attempting to address that question though.
My bet is “yes”, at maybe 80% confidence. I would say it’s fairly difficult to see though, because speculative projects grow very quickly and dwarf “normal” projects, setting unrealistic comparisons.
Both crypto skeptics and crypto promoters tend to be blinded by candlestick graphs.
The total number of active wallets is still fairly small (a few million), and so a “non-speculative” project doesn’t “seem” like a major project when folks attempt to compare its market cap against speculative projects.
For example, Dark Forest is fairly popular, but isn’t explicitly a speculative project. And so few folks outside of crypto have heard of it.
Crypto suffers from the problem that the speculative parts are mainstream (or at least, are very well known about), but non-speculative use cases are not.
I think this problem is mostly solved by the bubble popping. Crypto-skeptics can pat themselves on the back for predicting the obvious, but may end up being wrong long term because they missed the relatively “small” non-speculative projects.