Hey, I'm Advaith.
Senior at SJSU, was an intern at Coinbase, worked with early stage startups, largely within crypto
I spend 100% of my time in crypto. Read more about my crypto tech stack and projects
When I'm not coding, you'll find me playing basketball, bumping hip-hop or hiking.
I'm extremely interested in the blockchain and crypto space. We're in the early stages of a fundamental paradigm shift, which will take at least 10 years to fully materialize. While exploring crypto, I end up reading a lot of research papers and working on side projects for fun.
Hacking on cool things in DeFi, thinking about psuedonyms and building moats around protocols. Trying to play around with MEV and understand it better. Really glad MEV is picking up pace, much needed conversation in the ETH community (which will obviously find its way on evm forks eventually)
Unique potential to restructure interactions on the internet, creating a new way to establish trust. It's also a concentrated bet on where we end up, with bitcoin and the blockchain ecosystem possibly forming the basis for SV's ultimate exit.
For the same reason, incumbents end up exerting a lot of influence on a lot of things - market, competitors, sentiment. Its inevitable.
Key point here, is that companies like Facebook and google shouldn't be the owner of these graphs, rather a node in a much bigger graph (potentially created through crypto).
Blockchains remove the trusted intermediary that was previously required to maintain integrity. That's it - the core value proposition of blockchains.
Almost all of the other stuff is a false narrative, or a distraction from what blockchains can do. Any unnecessary form of rent extraction is wrong. Protocols are meant to be minimally extractive coordinators, and Ethereum is at the forefront of this, serving as a neutral base to run experiments on. So far, its turned out pretty well.
They are mean't to destroy revenues by disintermediating rent seekers. Currently, it looks like value is being diverted to public goods (uniswap and synthetix have $1B+ in theiry treasury).
I'd bet a popular narrative during 2017 was that 'Ethereum is the Myspace', 'Bitcoin is the first, I can make it better', just like how early internet played out. And so, you now have several other chains, with not a lot of activity, and better tech. Whats wrong here? I think its because you can't fork a community (atleast easily)
Another key point, I'm pretty sure multichain becomes a reality (app chains, region specific chains etc). However, I'd also like to think that the net value of a chain is correlated to how interconnected it is with a public chain (BTC & ETH for now)
During early and mid 2010's, anyone who wanted to make money on the internet would either (these are a few, and I'll focus on them):
For anything on the internet, this entails things such as SEO, content, building up a healthy amount of clicks. All of this can also be seen as 'bowing down to google and its rules'. People would closely follow Matt Cutts, head of search quality at google to look for clues, find an edge in ranking. It is not easy to rank #1 on a search phrase that has 100k searches a month. According to statistics, once you nail your SEO, and hit google's frontpage for high volume keywords, you get about 30% CTR (click through rate). For a 100k searches/month keyword, that translates to 30k clicks a month.
That was your distribution, and source of users. Really hard to compete for, a patient, compounding effort.
Niche Websites: Another interesting phenomenon I'd like to discuss is niche websites, micro-sites that focus on exclusively one topic. You'd go about building one targeted at a niche which has about 10k-15k searches a month and really low competition, and see some good results ~1 year in. Not a crazy 100k views/month, just a few thousand (think 5k uniques/month). The upside here is that you can monetize your highly targeted audience. This is effectively targeting the long tail distribution.
With blockchains, we can now build a market into almost anything. Bringing the long tail on-chain can have a massive impact on society. You don't need to look for distribution. In a sense, distribution comes to you on the blockchain.
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology lay the base down for open networks. We now stand a chance to recreate much better online experiences. Although in the early stages, having gone through several bubble styled appreciations, I see crypto emerging gradually. Its not whether crypto breaks out and goes mainstream. Its when and how. I'd measure crypto's stature in terms of growth over the last 5 years rather than since the 2017 boom.
We've seen a highly controversial blocksize debate, the infamous TheDAO hack, and the quick rise and downfall of ICO's.
I'd also argue that cryptocurrencies are catalyzing the usage of cryptography everywhere. It is very likely everyone on the internet will have a cryptographic identity in the future.
Reflecting on the past few years, the community has come up with rather interesting use cases and products. At a fundamental level, open networks will better solve inherent 'trust' issues within the internet.
I also think that the amount of hype around the 'crypto/blockchain' premise is definitely getting in the way of creating value. I'll attempt to explain this in a blog post later, using the example of Stablecoins.
Playing the long game, possessing a ridiculous amount of persistence and willpower can go a long way. I'd like to see where that takes me.
TL;DR - I mostly write for myself. HMU if you wanna talk crypto.
Subscribe to the newsletter
Get updates about new posts, new projects, or other meaningful updates to this site delivered to your inbox. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter.