(disclaimer my experiernce with building here is within eth l1 and solana + polkadot networks, my contract interactions extends to those as well as polygon and zkSync)

so this might be overdue but i figured i’d put down some simple thoughts about rent seeking behavior that irks me here.

• IPOs vs IDOs: While retail traders (apes and degens) that speculate on IPOs and DWAC are seen as the hero of the moment (is WSB still making headlines?), we’re already being seeing them being sublimated to suit the means of the one’s that already survived the gambling (instutional/trad finance). Robinhood being just a front for hedge fund fuckery and turning off the option to sell, fucking JIm Cramer stealing away their distilled animal spirits to sell some junk IPO that tanks in days.

Even if they’re a Coinbase, a mining rig setup, they’re still shitty IPOs that exploit your average ape’s serotonin when they press the buy button. I’m hopeful for IDOs being more equitable and “fair” but as we’ve seen with OHM forks such as Snowbank and Temple, there’s much work to be done.

• Scalability trillema solution hell: When i contributed to a defi project on solana, I was more than happy to work with building programs in Rust and a fan of the account (programs) abstraction, but i’ve stepped away from building further there. Seeing as the majority of validators are at least somewhat influenced by VCs and the ones promoting it are more preoccupied with profit seeking than the code and engineering it to scale (bugs with oracle, network being down), it just isn’t something I’d like to explore right now. I’m hopeful in the future they learn from that, happy to build multi-chain.

VC’s and other non-dev/technical participants on other L1s such as Solana and Avalanche are fine enough, i’m not here to gatekeep them or accuse them blindly of this behavior. But the whole blowup a month or so ago about promoting their low gas fees vs eth’s higher fees got me pretty heated, espicially when i see them spreading misinfo/misleading points.