Geoff with a G

Before anyone accuses me of FUDing again: I had a good call with Beau the other day. Nothing he shared fully disproved the conclusions I had reached from my own research, but I appreciate him picking up the phone and starting a dialogue. I am always open to changing my mind, and transparency and engagement are a step in that direction. Now, today's news. There is no shame in trying something ambitious and failing. The Abstract team's vision was the right one: make crypto accessible to the masses, and more fun and useful for consumers. I will leave the post-mortem on execution to others. What I will say is that this wind-down does more damage to the space than most people will appreciate in the immediate aftermath. First, it suggests there may not be real demand for a dedicated consumer chain, and by extension that crypto has still not found a use case for the average person. Most of us probably sensed this already, but it hurts to see it confirmed. Second, users spent a lot of money farming XP. Yes, plenty of that was bots and bad actors, but many of us believed in the vision and saw a chance to share in the upside alongside the team. "Play silly games, win silly prizes" applies, but someone was on the other side of those games and profited from them, and I would bet very little of that money finds its way back into web3. In plain terms, it has created another capital vacuum in an ecosystem that is already weak and shrinking. Not great. Finally, it shows how hard it is to build something significant in web3 in a short space of time. With other ambitious projects like Otherside still in the works, we have to accept that the odds of success remain VERY low. Most of these teams are fairly inexperienced, and there is no playbook that guarantees success. All in all, not a great day for web3. I hope nobody is fatally wounded by this, and that we find the strength to bounce back.