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“A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Crypto is for making mistakes

The great crypto bull market of 2025 lasted all the way until Jan. 20 — and already feels forgotten as the tariff drama consumes financial markets.

Crypto can seem frivolous by comparison: Stocks are down because tariffs threaten businesses with bankruptcy, consumers with rising prices, and employees with layoffs.

But nothing really happens when tokens are down, which makes crypto feel inconsequential by comparison.

So now might be a good time to remind ourselves that crypto has achieved the investing holy grail of “product-market fit” in at least five categories:

• Non-sovereign money (aka store of value, aka bitcoin)

• Speculation (aka gambling) 

• Stablecoins (aka dollars for anyone)

• Permissionless capital markets (aka DeFi)

• BabyFi (aka solving the world’s demographic problem)

I’m kidding about the last one.

Strictly speaking, BabyFi (the tokenization of newborns) is only a subset of “permissionless capital markets,” so of course it shouldn’t have its own spot on the list.

Also, it’s satire (I think).

The idea behind BabyFi is to incentivize people to have more children by enabling speculative investment in a child’s economic potential.

It’s honestly not the worst idea.

Governments have long tried to incentivize higher birth rates (without success) and crypto’s superpower is incentivizing behavior — so why not see if magic internet money can defuse the ticking demographic time bomb that’s threatening every developed economy?

Sadly, BabyFi is too reminiscent of the dystopian novel Never Let Me Go to be a serious proposal — buying a claim on a baby’s future earnings isn’t too far removed from raising a cloned baby to harvest their organs, as Kazuo Ishiguro imagined.

But even as a joke — or perhaps because it's a joke — BabyFi may illustrate what crypto does best: proposing absurd ideas that eventually make us reconsider what's possible.

Professional joke writers might see it as a good starting point. 

In his autobiography, Al Franken talks about how Saturday Night Live writers, desperate for new material, would take a proposed joke to an offensive, totally unacceptable extreme and then work back from there in hopes of finding something that’s just offensive enough to be funny and just inoffensive enough to be acceptable.

Working back from BabyFi, it might not be long until you get to something like Zora.

Zora is a social media platform where everything you post is automatically tokenized and instantly tradeable — the idea being that your social media feed could consist of things that people are paying for instead of just what an algorithm wants you to see.

It probably won't work — these crypto versions of existing things rarely catch on beyond the small cohort of natives who think everything short of babies should be financialized. 

But that’s OK because if Zora were likely to work, it wouldn't be very interesting.

There's plenty of investment capital available for things that will probably work — the traditional financial system does a perfectly adequate job of funding those.

Crypto, by contrast, is a financial system for things that probably won't work.

Even within crypto, Zora has gotten a mixed reception — do we really need to tokenize everything?

The skeptics are probably right — social media posts are too ephemeral to be worth anything and buying a post isn’t sufficiently different from just liking it.

Also, if you’re skeptical about every new thing in crypto, you will look smart about 98% of the time.

But that’s not the assignment.

As an investment, crypto is “liquid venture capital” (i.e., VC investments that trade publicly) and a venture capitalist's job is not to avoid zeros — there are always a lot of zeros.

Instead, a VC’s job is not to miss out on the biggest winners — they won’t get fired for investing in a disaster like WeWork, but they might do for not investing in a success like Airbnb.

Even so, Airbnb’s founders had such a hard time convincing investors that room-sharing was a viable business that they were reduced to selling boxes of cereal to fund their now-ubiquitous company.

In retrospect, they might have had an easier time as a DePIN-style crypto project because crypto investors seem willing to fund nearly anything (and all of them would have offered their rooms for rent).

DePIN didn't make my list of crypto successes because I’m not sure it's doing enough revenue to claim that it’s found product-market fit just yet.

But DePIN is at least proof of concept that crypto incentives are all you need to create novel types of businesses.

The businesses themselves are often unrelated to crypto — the only thing about most DePIN projects that’s onchain is the tokens.

But, among other unlikely things, those tokens have incentivized people to put cameras on their dashboards (Hivemapper), install antennas on their roofs (Geodnet), and share their internet bandwidth (Grass).

Similarly, people are rushing to tokenize their content on Zora, likely because they think it will earn them an airdrop.

The Zora token, if it happens, will be “just for fun” — it will have no utility, no claim on earnings and no governance rights.

It’s easy to dismiss a token that has no utility at all — investing isn’t supposed to be “just for fun.”

But I wouldn’t dismiss the effort. 

“I’m gonna keep trying new things,” Jesse Pollak, Zora’s chief evangelist, told Laura Shin. “Because trying new things, embracing new products, being unafraid…to push those new things, that’s how greatness happens.”

If Zora turns out to be great it could disrupt social media by disrupting the algorithms that currently control what information the world sees.

It probably won’t!

But it’s worth a try because crypto, at its best, is the financial system for things that probably won’t work.

— Byron Gilliam

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ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization.

Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance.

With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

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_{Brought to you by:}

ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization.

Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance.

With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.