Chase Good Crypto UX, Not The Next Hyped Meta
Most crypto traders seem to be focused on finding the next “meta,” or hyped crypto narrative, to trade and make a profit on. I suggest this is actually an underperforming strategy, and we should all be hunting for the next good user experience.
There is always a collection of hyped “narratives” that everyone seems to be dead set on. One day it’s ordinals, another day it’s liquid restaking, memes, AI coins, generative art NFTs or some new token standard. You could be watching the space all day and it’s still hard to keep up. Narrative pumps are hard to find early and they’re hard to ride.
With a more long-term outlook on the space in mind, I believe the biggest hurdle crypto faces has always been user experience. I believe finding the applications and protocols that reduce user experience friction, and improve ease of use and speed are the biggest opportunities to be hunting for.
Here are some examples from the past that drastically improved user experience:
- 2015 — Ethereum ERC-20 standard and Ethereum wallets made the user-experience of minting and trading tokens far superior over what was possible on top of Bitcoin.
- 2019 — Uniswap was the first AMM that made it super easy for anyone to launch a Liquidity Pool.
- 2021 — Solana made the user experience simple and great with fast and cheap transactions.
- 2024 — Coinbase made the user experience of bridging to an ETH L2 far easier with its Coinbase Wallet applications which could connect directly to Coinbase
- 2024 — Pump.fun and Friend.tech make no-code no-capital token creation platforms
Looking forward, I would be interested in the following areas of innovation:
- Smart contract chains that can sustain low fees and high throughput (e.g. Base, Solana) and an easy fiat on-ramp source (e.g. Coinbase)
- Applications that have novel use cases and social network effects that allow creators to create tokens without any code or capital requirements (e.g. SocialFi, meme launchers)
I am fascinated and impressed with the concept of token creation platforms like Friend.Tech, because it essentially allows anyone to create a token with real social utility without any code, capital or any technical knowledge. I am also impressed to see Pump.Fun make it super easy for anyone to launch a coin without any capital for a Liquidity Pool.
Chasing narratives can be risky, because there are endless new ones sprouting everyday, and there’s an endless army of me-too projects who are not long-term players and just riding the narrative. The narrative chasing tokens can be too late, or crash at any moment’s time. It’s easy to be caught with a “me-too” dud. Narratives can pump so long that it feels like it’s the new normal, but can die within a moment.
Ethereum is the internet of value. It’s a public and open protocol for decentralized transfer of value on the internet. Anything and everything people want to assign value to on the internet, can be tokenized on Ethereum. There is massive potential for applications and new trends that will capture mainstream attention, just like NFTs, DeFi, memes and whatever the next trend may be.
