Why Real Utility vs Speculative Usage is a false dichotomy

Crypto is a seething mass of contradictions. We love privacy yet broadcast everything onchain. We mistrust TradFi but trust them to send orange coin. We despise pump and dumps but love selling the top.

Nowhere is this contradiction more pronounced than when debating what constitutes “real” usage. Is 10,000 apes sending ETH through a one-way contract the future of Base or the beginning of the end?

On the one hand, crypto’s 14 years old now and its primary use case is still speculation. On the other hand, crypto’s 14 and look at all the cool ways you can now speculate onchain.

Every day we stray further from banking the unbanked

It’s become popular to filter onchain transactions into “legitimate” and “degenerate” activity.

• DeFi + enterprise usage = pure

• Everything else = impure

  Flipping ponzi coins on a memechain? “Oh that’s just degens degening – it’s not real economic activity.”

But to dismiss all frivolous activity out of hand is to misread the onchain tea leaves.

At Cielo, peering into the murk and giving it a good swill is what we do. And what we’ve found may surprise you.

It turns out that it’s hard to bifurcate web3 users into two distinct camps. The righteous and the reckless; the suited and the ones trading in their birthday suits. In reality, the worlds of degens and non-degens are intertwined. Or to put it memetically:

From looking onchain, we find:

• Hedge funds aping into ponzinomic protocols

• VCs switching between DeFi and MemeFi

• Art Blocks whales using capital-efficient money markets

• Self-styled degens becoming connoisseurs of generative art

• Airdrop farmers eschewing dumping for delegating

Just consider that last one for a second. We’re talking about profiteers running 100 wallets who farmed to dump but then wound up supporting emerging ecosystems and now they’re here forever. That’s quite the Damascene conversion.

It’s not that their moral code has changed – they’re still here to make money and dump on TradFi – but their method has. Speculation can be a gateway to developing a serious crypto habit.

Come for the unsustainable yields…stay for the sustainable yields?

It turns out that onchain, no one is 100% degen and no one is entirely “pure.”

It was the same in the early days of the internet: those who believed it was only good for adult entertainment missed the seismic shift that was occurring as more legitimate use cases emerged.

It’s okay to swerve memecoins, do DeFi, and stick to pure plays. But don’t dismiss degens as reckless gamblers or assume the suits are as risk-off as they make out.

What happens onchain stays onchain: crypto keeps the receipts. So before you dismiss a particular network as being a gamblers’ paradise or an entire user group as being buzzed on leverage, take a closer look at their onchain activity. As a wise man once put it, “Let he who has no memecoins throw the first stone.”

At Cielo we’re focused on building tools to follow activity on Ondo and Goldfinch for RWA; POAP for web3; NiftyGateway, Sound, and Mirror.xyz for NFTs; as well as prediction markets, perps platforms, NFTFi, and lending protocols.

We’re excited for what lies on the cutting edge: Uniswap v4, advanced account abstraction, better onchain governance, cross-chain swaps and LSDfi. Cielo will be supporting all of it. But we’ve still got love for the streets: for the chains and protocols where, to misquote Hunter S. Thompson, lies a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.

Because sometimes, what crawls out of that trench evolves into something greater. Today’s pool two is tomorrow’s institutional game-changer.

So while the speculators speculate and the defiers DeFi, we’ll keep building a bigger tent for everyone: the degens, the non-degens, and those who can’t quite figure where their proclivities lie. This is for you.