The End of the Yield Greed Era

The last 13 years of crypto have spanned 4 distinct eras, and the last was colored in greed and systemic collapse. How will these trends affect the next decade of crypto?

The blockchain industry is barely 13 years old but has become one of the world’s fastest-growing industries. It has undergone significant changes affecting how people interact with the technology. As the Web3 ecosystem strives for everyday acceptability, it’s essential to understand how its evolving as political, economic, and philosophical expectations attempt to find harmony. I posit that the blockchain ecosystem has progressed through three distinct eras — each of which has been the basis for exponential growth — either through increased market capitalization or lesson-learning collapse.

Note, that these eras are defined in the context of blockchain technology maturing as a mainstream technology, as everything continues to evolve in parallel.

Article TLDR

• Excessive token emissions only attract fleeting liquidity provision and unprofitable cryptoeconomics
• Unscrupulous venture capital protocol investment will continue to encourage the importance of token price manipulation over protocol pragmatism / practicality
• DeFi and CeFi collapses (and exploits) will likely provoke regulatory overreaction that further constrains blockchain innovation
• Venture capital virtue signaling, nepotistic (i.e., poor) due diligence, and limited crypto-native investment expertise has and will cause artificial, meteoric rises of emerging technology companies that are undeserving of financial support
• Protocol pragmatism, token vesting periods, and heightened consumer protection via cybersecurity and education will be the blockchain redeemers of 2023+

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