
I'd side with @cdixon in that imo both non-financial as well as of course financial crypto innovation will continue surprising to the upside over the long term. With Respect to Haseeb, any particular timeline of "if it hasn't happened in N years..." doesn't seem operative. In contrast, Chris's view that many use cases simply require different kinds of building blocks that must come before, with often surprising path dependencies and emergent behaviors, seems like a proof by construction. We shouldn't need a historical analogy to argue this. But arpanet (the initial internet) sent its first message 35 years before facebook was founded. Not saying it's going to take that long before we find a breakout non-financial use case 😂 I'd also draw an illustrative distinction between "financial" use cases vs. "finance": Onchain is, at the highest level, a digital mechanism for friction reduction. Economic exchange and coordination is the most important phenomenon that has found a next-gen solution in onchain. Onchain began with finance use cases like lending and swapping. It's being extended with financial use cases like ecom and micropayments. We have every theoretical reason to expect onchain to continue chipping away at all problems and areas of opportunity related to friction reduction. A really great book on friction (what economists call transactions costs) is Tomorrow 3.0 by Mike Munger. It explains that a good model for friction is Triangulation x Transfer x Trust. I.e. how do you discover the exchange opportunity? How do you execute on the exchange opportunity? And how do you know you're not going to get rugged? If you squint, every successful product addresses, one or more of these factors. The best ones often address all three. For me as an ETH investor, this means I believe that innovation and growth on Ethereum will continue to exceed the expectations of even insiders. For VCs, they'll figure it out 😂
