* PoolTogether: that's literally a lottery. Hardly an innovation.
* Aave: oh, _another_ crypto lending platform. Aside from the fact that most of these are Ponzi/scams that have collapsed in spectacular fashion recently (see Anchor, Celsius, etc), this is another app that only exists within crypto to earn more crypto.
Those 3 examples illustrate the problem of "dApps". There may be a vibrant ecosystem of idea and apps, but when you try to unwind them you realize most of them are entirely self-referential within the crypto ecosystem and there's no utility connecting them to the real world. That's because the few apps that do try to connect to the real world quickly realize that the space of problems that can actually be solved by crypto there is ridiculously small.
You don't even need to go that broad. I'm working in the cloud infrastructure field (think Kubernetes and such). Just following all developments in that narrow space is such a mind-boggingly huge task that it's physically impossible for a single person to follow all of it (except at extreme surface level). And that's before we consider other areas of tech. Or other areas of interest (politics, science, culture).
To make the task of navigating the world even somewhat tractable, we all have to rely on outside authorities whom we trust for a lot of our information diet. Hence why I am very grateful for known figures like Moxie Marlinspike to examine this topic and provide me with a succinct summary of their impression through writing. That's not to say that I take everything Moxie says as gospel, but I know enough about him to judge which of his statements can be trusted and which need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Looks like another polished scam to take advantage of ignorant users, or 'degens' in crypto vernacular.
It seems as though, the majority of HN users haven't invested any time into understanding it. So they just label it bad.
I wasted a year of my life working for a crypto company, I've actually committed code to Ethereum through the Geth project. I learned it's all a casino of completely useless money moving schemes.
What makes even ENS cool tech? The sole purpose of those .eth domains is to receive crypto, ohh and make the founders extremely wealthy. Why did they need to launch an ENS coin, other than to dump on the public when it was 5x the current price.
Have these people writing these kind of articles ever downloaded a browser wallet and played around with Defi? The amount of ignorance here is staggering. How is it on HN? HN is supposed to be a place for people who are tech savvy and are able to think about the future and imagine it different from yesterday.