Photo by ANDREW HOLBROOKE/Corbis via Getty Images
I had to blink a few times. Looking at the cap table of a prospective investment, something jumped out at me. One of the primary backers of this fledgling startup was...another fledgling startup, itself no more than 12 months old. But this was not any young startup. It was a 2017-vintage-successful-ICO startup. Welcome to our new world, where the lines between company, open source software product, and venture investment firm blur together.
In these early moments, when it seems like all the infrastructure still needs to be built, it's easy to be optimistic. Unbounded upside is the very nature of the venture capital business — and when the whole world is seeking return for capital (and every asset class seems overpriced), this unbounded upside seems like a reasonable bet.
But let's turn our attention to the year 2025, and visit some of the projects from today. This world may seem far away—but the signs of its arrival are all around us. Consider news in just the last 48 hours:
When before have we had companies dedicate 2/3rds of funds raised to a venture fund for their own ecosystem?
When before have crypto assets funded the purchase of an entire bank?
The Backbones
Our first stop in 2025 is at one of the winning platform's headquarters. “Headquarters” is a bit of a misnomer here — while there is a huge physical presence, it's actually a collection of economic activity around this platform. There are direct employees of the original foundation. There are offices for early backers — now running multi-billion funds, based in the underpinning currency. Open community space where builders (affiliated, open source, and otherwise) work away. "Open" space in a relative sense: one must prove how they contribute to this platform for entry. (Another kind of “proof-of-work.”)
There's no centralized drumbeat like you saw back in 2017 on campuses like Google and Facebook; rather many disjointed efforts all tied together around a core economic activity. And this bustling physical space isn't the center of activity—merely a large node, with counterparts in Crypto-friendly world cities across the globe.
The annual meeting of this group is a frenzy of economic activity and platform integrations. Resources amongst members quickly circulate into the most promising new entrants in the ecosystem. If you squint, it almost looks like a Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder meeting — but where any folksiness is wiped away with Cypherpunk principles.
The Centralized Actors
The universe has an odd “conservation-of-centralization” effect (more on this another day)—every time some system is decentralized, new chokepoints are created that foster centralization.
We take the elevator to the 72nd floor—to visit one of these new central actors. The closest we could imagine to this business in 2017 was a centralized fiat-to-crypto gateway. The skyline quietly dominates the space, sprawling beneath our perch.
This business is hiring, sort of. More the way that a professional sports team scouts and selects, rather than growing. They have dominated their corner of this new universe so thoroughly that all the principals would stop working, dulled by their success and wealth, were their stronghold not so software-enabled and seemingly permanent.
We're one of few visitors—there's rarely any customers or even regulators—so much of the actual economic activity technically is registered far, far from here, so there's little to hide, see, or humans to serve. One can just image the hardware wallet in a vault, somewhere physically on Earth, seeing the dividends from this tiny wedge in a giant ecosystem.
But there are few people around, so we must continue on our journey.
">Photo by ANDREW HOLBROOKE/Corbis via Getty Images
I had to blink a few times. Looking at the cap table of a prospective investment, something jumped out at me. One of the primary backers of this fledgling startup was...another fledgling startup, itself no more than 12 months old. But this was not any young startup. It was a 2017-vintage-successful-ICO startup. Welcome to our new world, where the lines between company, open source software product, and venture investment firm blur together.
In these early moments, when it seems like all the infrastructure still needs to be built, it's easy to be optimistic. Unbounded upside is the very nature of the venture capital business — and when the whole world is seeking return for capital (and every asset class seems overpriced), this unbounded upside seems like a reasonable bet.
But let's turn our attention to the year 2025, and visit some of the projects from today. This world may seem far away—but the signs of its arrival are all around us. Consider news in just the last 48 hours:
When before have we had companies dedicate 2/3rds of funds raised to a venture fund for their own ecosystem?
When before have crypto assets funded the purchase of an entire bank?
The Backbones
Our first stop in 2025 is at one of the winning platform's headquarters. “Headquarters” is a bit of a misnomer here — while there is a huge physical presence, it's actually a collection of economic activity around this platform. There are direct employees of the original foundation. There are offices for early backers — now running multi-billion funds, based in the underpinning currency. Open community space where builders (affiliated, open source, and otherwise) work away. "Open" space in a relative sense: one must prove how they contribute to this platform for entry. (Another kind of “proof-of-work.”)
There's no centralized drumbeat like you saw back in 2017 on campuses like Google and Facebook; rather many disjointed efforts all tied together around a core economic activity. And this bustling physical space isn't the center of activity—merely a large node, with counterparts in Crypto-friendly world cities across the globe.
The annual meeting of this group is a frenzy of economic activity and platform integrations. Resources amongst members quickly circulate into the most promising new entrants in the ecosystem. If you squint, it almost looks like a Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder meeting — but where any folksiness is wiped away with Cypherpunk principles.
The Centralized Actors
The universe has an odd “conservation-of-centralization” effect (more on this another day)—every time some system is decentralized, new chokepoints are created that foster centralization.
We take the elevator to the 72nd floor—to visit one of these new central actors. The closest we could imagine to this business in 2017 was a centralized fiat-to-crypto gateway. The skyline quietly dominates the space, sprawling beneath our perch.
This business is hiring, sort of. More the way that a professional sports team scouts and selects, rather than growing. They have dominated their corner of this new universe so thoroughly that all the principals would stop working, dulled by their success and wealth, were their stronghold not so software-enabled and seemingly permanent.
We're one of few visitors—there's rarely any customers or even regulators—so much of the actual economic activity technically is registered far, far from here, so there's little to hide, see, or humans to serve. One can just image the hardware wallet in a vault, somewhere physically on Earth, seeing the dividends from this tiny wedge in a giant ecosystem.
But there are few people around, so we must continue on our journey.
Read Again Broooh https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahjessop/2018/02/28/the-ghost-ships-of-crypto/Bagikan Berita Ini
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