@Clinamenic I’m sure you get asked this a lot and have answered elsewhere, but whats up w crypto/web3/NFT world these days? Back during the zenith of hype, a friend of mine was getting ‘seed funding’ to build some video game-DAW hybrid I was convinced was vaporware. The game’s basically finished but they never released it, I guess a lot of the team just moved on as the pandemic died down. Another guy I know lost his mind, couldn’t get a sentence out without using the word “distribution” or uttering some weird masochistic joke about intentionally ruining your life and enjoying it.
Web3 is still quite active, but thankfully the bear market (largely brought on by a few big exchanges like FTX and Celsius going down, VC groups like Three Arrows going down, and a couple mid-sized stablecoins destabilizing) has swept away most of the speculative noise, leaving mostly the people who are focused on the non-financial applications of the tech. In my case, I mainly focus on governance,
like this article.
Most of my investments didn't pan out, but thankfully in my case it was just due to a lack of financial and market knowledge and poor risk assessment, rather than being scammed. I did lose $200 of ETH to a malicious DeFi protocol though. Lately ETH has been up, which is pretty much the only crypto I hold. But I still do business is stablecoins (pay contractors in stablecoins, receive payments from clients in fiat and stablecoins, give and receive grants in stablecoins and ETH, etc), but only the big stablecoins which have (thus far) had good track records, like DAI and USDC.
While I would really benefit from another bull run, ultimately I dread it because I know it will flood the industry again with bullshit artists and irrational exuberance. I really do love the web3 industry, at least the public goods sector (
I'm helping run a grants program now, for civics and advocacy projects on Public Goods Network). I hope to keep doing pro bono or "quasi bono" work in this sector, seeing as there generally isn't a lot of funding available for these experimental nonprofit orgs. Its a shame this sector (public goods sector on Ethereum and Ethereum layer-2's) doesn't get mainstream coverage at all, what with the SBF controversy dominating the popular mindshare on the topic, so yeah its almost impossible for me to explain to people what I do haha.
