Why not all funding is valued uniformly
Some crypto users will be familiar with the term “Dark Forest“, others will have heard the attribute “shadowy supercoder”, and still, most users, investors, and coders, remain utterly disconnected from reality. This cognitive dissonance is nothing but the introduction to an illusory dichotomy that, somehow, will inevitably eat the world.
Product-market fit is blind, just like the fancy replication of a forked project. When opportunity is the cost, and time is the base asset, most bow their knee to the ground and forget about what truly matters. Accountability takes courage. That’s why it hurts so much. Its hedonistic nature somehow removes the human layer and hides its essence behind a random avatar and a username borrowed from the good old geek games we used to play when we were kids.
Decentralization is not an excuse for not being held accountable. Failing to learn the ropes is a bump in the road to an open-ended solution, and making experiments are not akin to raising money.
On the issue of what most people call “forks” in DeFi, sometimes they are necessary, but they are often brought forward by unexperienced teams unable to deliver. The learning curve is high, just like the exponential growth of a newborn industry who pretends to change the world of traditional finance. Well known figures like Harry Yeh have already emphasized the need for accountability in the Crypto Space in the sense that “The finish line is the starting line”. However, most users forget about the person behind the code that somehow dictates the law. As a matter of fact, it is up to the individual developer to undergo a pleasant learning experience with the flexibility that most employees always desired, or fall into a cascade of stressful situations that lead to the topic of “building in DeFi sucks”. For the coders, there are 2 options: lean on the proxy and upgrade the law, or stick to the primitives of blockchain and enforce immutability.
All this paradox is counterintuitive, but we need the VCs as much as we need the on-chain sleuths and the scammers. Every penny the VC sells for profit is an opportunity for promoting the growth of the next gem just as much as it is a chance for the detectives to honor their skills and expose the scammers, whether it is a team of developers from the MIT or a bunch of friends who got together to crave their curiosity for the sake of JPEGS as an investment round. Public goods via Gitcoin grants can be a huge opportunity to open up the doors of innovation and a safety-first approach, but individualistic and pretentious behaviors should not be the main incentive (a.k.a. “I spend all my time doing this, therefore I need funding for this grant” vs “Here is the idea, now let’s collaborate and build this altogether“).
It turns out that awareness is the proof of courage to be disliked. On the developers’ shoulders lays the groundwork of a forever-paying toll paid on: mental health, financial equities, social reputation, self-pride, educational opportunities, and life-lessons that promised to pave the road towards freedom.
Ultimately, everyone looking for freedom is staking in the mental liquidity of the crypto ecosystem, a multidisciplinary wold that puts together the best and the worst of every eccentric mind out there in the wilderness of a re-imagined life. Most participants are aware of the fact that liquidity is a critical component for the well-functioning of financial markets in order to ensure that supply meets demand. Pricing inefficiencies, however, are hard to curate in a decentralized world where not everyone always acts with integrity.
Nobody cares about someone’s political leanings or economic forecasts. Nobody is excluded, but still completely rational beliefs are grounded in a science that has evolved over time and whose approaches towards political, social, and economic ideologies are still to be unmasked. And so we ended up with a large number of market participants at the extremes – one group who's living in fear and wearing three masks on a deserted beach and another group who's claiming it's all a hoax and that wearing a mask in crowded places is the end of freedom.
After all, it boils down to diverging responses looking for an answer to individual optimizations. Not all preservation of wealth is equally sized. One of the challenges of the operation remains the lack of mental liquidity around the issue of uncertainty, where most people think their view or set of values is correct, at the same time that new information is unlikely to make them change their minds. Balaji Srinivasan raised the question: is Bitcoin for real? “Do you think cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are as trasformative of an innovation as the Internet browser? That digital currencies can replace the dollar like Google replaced the encyclopedia? Or do you think that Bitcoin is more like . . . Beanie babies? A bubble driven by overhyped mania that will burst as all bubbles do?”
The genuine open mind is the backbone of a mental liquidity that becomes more difficult to sustain as the yield slows down its rewards. Despite the challenges, with more mental liquidity comes more clarity and compassion, specially on a hyper-productive world where strong convictions are loosely held by the paper and diamond hands of a few. Everyone is free to experience and develop their core set of values, but it pays off to remain open to changing your mind as you navigate down the impulse of the whales. Dive in and get out of the emotional regulation by understanding the inner highs and lows. Regulation hacks are the key to learning how to get yourself out of a position you don’t wish to be in.