My hot take is that hyper-financialization has everyone looking in the wrong direction for web3 growth.

I'm way more bullish on networked multiplayer media than digitally scarce NFTs. 🧵

This means networks accrue value not objects. It means crypto is a component in the stack, not the be all and end all. We'll use it when it makes sense, i.e. settling state, managing access, creating neutrally credible substrates for composability.

Financial upside will take a backseat to entertainment. Entertainment will be participatory. We'll use apps because they fulfill us in ways that passive broadcast media & algo-driven social media cannot.

Gaming is the obvious example, but we are sleeping on other use cases. Take the marriage of creative AI & worldbuilding for example. Both of those communities are much larger than our NFT bubble (there's 3 million people in the Midjourney discord, 1 million in r/worldbuilding).

I can see a genre emerging that combines AI text to image, lore & worldbuilding. Networks will organize to play digital gods & live stories together. It'll be passion driven and value expression over number go up. Crypto will only be piece in the stack.

And those are the two key points I think people are missing. Financialization & cryptocentric design are on top of everyone's mind. Our space has a tunnel vision that assumes the primacy of $$$ and blockchains, when maybe they are only a part of the recipe.

If you only have a hammer, then everything is a nail. If you only have a blockchain, then everything is a ponzi.

Web3 is about permissionless decentralized networks. Add more tools to the belt & more things can be built.

Decentralized tools exist beyond crypto. AIs like Stable Diffusion. Social layers soon to be operating systems like Urbit. Storage networks & compute. Most importantly the tools are not just tech, but mindsets & philosophies.

Growth is going to come from areas where crypto is symbiotic with & sometimes submissive to other tech stacks. In hindsight this will seem obvious, but our space still has blinders on because the speculative bubble of the last bull looked so damn good.

Digital scarcity works in the upper echelon of some NFT categories. Only, most people in our space think that'll work broadly across all categories and we are just early. That's naivety.

A realist view is that most of them will price as entertainment. Right now they are not that entertaining because crypto can only do so much on its own.

The entertaining part comes when crypto falls back in importance as part of a larger decentralized experience.

Alright, let's wrap this rant up. We'll get more interesting use cases when people realize blockchains are just peanut butter. Once we add bread and jelly, shit will really click.

Networked multiplayer media is the sandwich we are waiting on, not more crypto.