_{Brought to you by:}

Can crypto’s cage match turn positive sum?

The crypto industry’s endemic infighting seems to be intensifying. 

On the one hand, this is unfortunate: Shouldn't crypto believers be united in the existential battle against the legions of crypto skeptics?

Crypto’s warring factions are behaving like the kings of Westeros, too busy slaughtering each other to notice that the Night King and his White Walkers are about to come through the Wall.

(For the non-Game of Thrones enthusiasts, Senator Warren is the Night King here and her anti-crypto army are the White Walkers.)

On the other hand, there is some logic to the infighting: The current bull market has so far failed to attract many new users or investors, so it’s understandable if crypto’s factions feel they have no choice but to fight it out amongst themselves for the ones that are already here.

Most prominently, the fierceness of the modular Ethereum vs. monolithic Solana debate seems (to me, at least) like an admission that the only way to win new users and investors is to poach them from the other side.

That's probably short-sighted.

The history of business and innovation suggests that these debates are not resolved by the relative merits of one side’s arguments — instead, they are decided by action. 

If so, we may be wasting our energy debating the one true path for crypto. 

The only way to determine what will work is to take both paths and see where they lead.

Chances are, we’ll be surprised.

The only way?

Nothing could have been less predictable and more surprising than the Wright brothers’ success.

In a recent paper exploring the unique advantages of human cognition, Professor Teppo Felin cites the Wright brothers’ intuition-based success as evidence that not all decisions should be evidence-based. 

In the case of flying machines, no evidence-based argument could be made that anything heavier than a turkey would ever be able to get more than a few feet off the ground: “All of the evidence clearly suggested that a belief in human powered flight was delusional.”

The Wright brothers — high school dropouts, both — intuited otherwise. 

And if they hadn’t chosen to risk everything based on that seemingly delusional intuition, it might still take us two weeks to cross the Atlantic.  

From this and many other examples, Professor Felin concludes that the ability to ignore all data and evidence and go with our gut is one of the “superpowers” of human cognition.

If so, all of the evidenced-based arguing we do on social media may not get us any closer to the truth. 

The only way to find out whether a proposed path is a productive one is to take a leap of faith and follow it.

Steve Wozniak, for example, had both evidence and logic on his side in his belief that personal computers would never catch on: “For most personal tasks, such as balancing a checkbook, consulting airline schedules, writing a modest number of letters, paper works just as well as a computer, and costs less,” he told an interviewer shortly after the first Mac was released in 1984.

“Nobody at Apple is going to like hearing this, but as a general device for everyone, computers have been oversold.” 

Fortunately, he chose to ignore his own logic and follow Steve Jobs’ intuition that user-friendly computers would inspire us to find new things to do with them.

If he hadn’t, we might now be navigating the internet by typing commands into our IBM desktops instead of clicking icons on our iPhones.

Can’t we all just get along?

Sometimes, opposing sides of an argument can both be right.

The history of business features many such cases:

IKEA was right that people would want low-quality, DIY furniture and Crate & Barrel was right that people would want high-quality, bespoke furniture. 

Southwest Airlines’ contrarian decision to use a point-to-point route system has been equally as successful as their rival Jet Blue’s conformist decision to use a hub system.

HBO’s success was based on offering a small number of high quality shows and Netflix’s success has been based on offering a large number of low quality shows. 

Apple’s closed-garden business model has worked out nearly as well as Microsoft’s open-platform model.

That last example is the most analogous to the current crypto debate and perhaps the most hopeful one, too.

The enmity between Apple and Microsoft enthusiasts in the 1990s and 2000s was at least as deeply felt then as it is now between Ethereum and Solana enthusiasts.

It felt like an existential cage match at the time, but against expectations, the competition turned out to be a positive-sum race to two different places.

Apple’s walled garden gave us MacBooks and iPhones and Microsoft’s platform gave us Office and Azure.

Could crypto’s warring factions do the same?

There’s not much point arguing about it, because there’s only one way to find out: Try.

— Byron Gilliam

Brought to you by:

MANTRA, the world’s leading RWA L1 blockchain, has launched its incubator aimed at fueling the next era of Web3 innovation. The MANTRA Incubator program kicks off at the prestigious Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) and offers 5 promising projects a seed investment of $100,000. 

Reasons you should apply: 

• Seed funding: Each project will receive $100,000 in seed investment, personally funded by the CEO & Co-Founder, John Patrick Mullin. 

• Global exposure: Participants experience Dubai, Hong Kong and San Francisco ecosystems, while networking with experts, developers, VCs globally. 

• End-to-end concept to market support: Receive expert support in development, marketing, operations, and more to effectively go-to-market. 

Ready to take the leap? Apply now to transform your ideas into a successful venture.

What's the end game for inflation?

This week, we discuss our takeaways from this weeks crucial CPI & PPI prints alongside the Fed's slightly hawkish FOMC meeting. We deep dive into the current market structure & discuss whether or not this rally could be about to enter a couple months of weakness? Enjoy!

Watch or listen to On the Margin on YouTube, Spotify or Apple.

Thank you to our sponsor:

The PayPal stablecoin PYUSD is live on Solana. PayPal has over two decades of payments experience and is now making low-cost, high-throughput Web3 payments possible through the PYUSD on Solana launch.

Learn about PYUSD on Solana and start building the future of payments.

PayPal, Inc. is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services.