What other ambitious projects are there in the crypto market?

Original title: Crypto's Waning Ambition
Author: Ignas | DeFi, Co-founder of @PinkBrains_io DeFi Creator Studio
Compiled by: Ashley, BlockBeats

Editor's note: After experiencing multiple innovation cycles, the encryption industry is ushering in a boom period with continued price increases. However, there are hidden worries behind the bright surface - the innovation engine is gradually slowing down, and risk aversion is gradually dispelling ambition and risk-taking spirit. From DeFi, NFT to decentralized science (DeSci), the radical ideas of the past are gradually being replaced by more stable business models. This article provides an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and explores the opportunities and risks brought about by perhaps the last "bubble innovation". In the face of an increasingly mature industry, can the crypto world still regain the ambition of a newborn calf who is not afraid of tigers?

The following is the original content (the original content has been edited for ease of reading and understanding):

Glossy on the outside, tired on the inside

At first glance, the crypto industry seems to be thriving: after years of ostracism, spot ETFs are finally online, and Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs have attracted record inflows; Trump’s election as president has opened the door for the crypto industry to get closer to mainstream American society As lobbying power increases, Gensler and other opponents face greater pressure; now, the crypto industry has been recognized as an independent industry, and Bitcoin is even regarded as a reserve asset by some countries.

Price-wise, I remain optimistic about the crypto market, with the main upward momentum coming from external macro factors. However, I think the innovation engine within the crypto industry is slowly slowing down.

As an industry matures, the pace of innovation naturally slows; nevertheless, prices are likely to continue to climb even as innovation slows.

The real problem: fading ambition

But I dare say that the slowdown in innovation is not the cause of the problem, but a symptom. The real problem is that our ambitions are fading and the industry's aversion to risk is increasing.

The crypto industry, once founded on radical ideas that disrupted the world, now seems content to pursue regulatory approval and institutional adoption.

Don’t just take my word for it, take a look at what Vitalik wrote in his 2023 blog post about “Bringing Ethereum Back to the Cyberpunk Spirit”:

"The purpose of our existence is not only to develop isolated tools and games, but to promote a freer and more open society and economy as a whole, allowing different parts of technology, society and economy to integrate with each other."

Think carefully: What innovations are there in this cycle?

AI×Crypto is one.

But AI is an external innovation. Without it, this cycle may still be stuck in hyping meme coins.

I personally don't like meme coins because their only real goal is to get rich quick rather than actually changing the world. The purpose of these programs is simply to make you rich enough that you no longer care about the problems of the outside world.

Do you still remember the passage we often used in the last cycle?

"[Project Name] is the most egalitarian thing we've ever seen, it's incredibly ambitious, and if it succeeds, it will really change the fabric of society."

However, in contrast, in the last cycle we witnessed a variety of radical innovations:

DeFi

NFT

DeFi Mining

P2E games like Axie Infinity

metaverse

During 2020-2021, innovation in the token economic model also reached its peak, such as:

Rebasing Token (Ampleforth)

ve model token economy

(3,3) model

Liquidity mining

Use SNX as collateral for sUSD

Multiple algorithmic stablecoins

Today's project and VC backers prefer to adopt a time-proven simple token economic model and prefer stable operations because they usually only have one TGE opportunity.

$EIGEN (Elementary Objectivity Token) is a rare exception in the field of token economic models.

The ICO craze of 2017 was arguably the peak of ambition, with bold ideas trying to decentralize everything. It was an imaginative bubble, many ideas were too wild and never came to fruition, most projects failed, and the ones that survived had to water down their vision.

However, these wild concepts attracted a group of people, myself included, who longed for a very different world.

I was recently reading "Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation" by B. Hobart and T. Huber, who explain that transformative progress comes from small groups with a unified vision, who are well-funded and have little accountability. They argue that despite the negative reputation of financial bubbles, many past breakthroughs have benefited from them and future progress will be driven by them.

While we haven't completely bid farewell to the era of "lack of responsibility" yet, as regulation tightens and the industry's risk aversion increases, this may be the last big bubble cycle that can lead to actual innovation. I hope that the AI-encryption bubble will spawn at least one or two killer applications.

Ambitions remain

That’s not to say there aren’t ambitious crypto projects out there today, but here are a few worth paying attention to:

Ethena: Integrating DeFi, CeFi and TradFi

Chainlink: providing a bridge between on-chain and real-world data for tamper-proof smart contracts

Pudgy Penguins: Expanding from Web3 IP brand into Web2 realm

WorldCoin: Allowing everyone to be identified on-chain through eye scanning, with potential AI funding for UBI

Liquity/RAI: The Last Decentralized Stablecoin

Arweave/Filecoin: Permanent Storage and Censorship Resistance

Farcaster/Lens: Redefining social media

Polymarket: Your source of truth in the age of real and fake news

Bio Protocol (DeSci): Disrupting scientific research by changing the incentive system

Bitcoin: Revolutionary Digital Gold

You might think WorldCoin's eyeball scan is too aggressive, or that Liquidity v2 and its named $BOLD stablecoin won't succeed. But these are exactly the risks that an ambitious deal is willing to take. They're the most egalitarian thing we've ever seen, wildly ambitious and, if successful, will truly change the fabric of society.

Ethereum is conspicuously absent from this list, and maybe I’m being a little harsh on ETH, but Vitalik’s cyberpunk vision is barely noticeable on Twitter. The upcoming fork will have some very minor updates, at least not noticeable to users. It will give up sharding technology and L1 expansion. The best part we have thought of recently is to slightly increase the gas limit of the block.

Ethereum appears to be outsourcing both execution and ambition to L2.

ETH’s North Star is still not visible. I want to see Ethereum be great again, and I want radical new ideas to emerge. However, currently Ethereum seems to accept the idea that modular blockchains cannot scale, while Solana has chosen a very different path, sticking to the monolithic chain model, although network expansion may eventually prove that Ethereum's approach is correct.

Humanity needs new boundaries

The world, especially the West, seemed to be at a standstill.

Wage growth has stagnated, new iPhones are no longer innovative, and even music sounds repetitive. We keep seeing the same movie remakes because launching a new movie is riskier than remaking a classic. To some extent, we are even going backwards. For example, due to the discontinuation of Concorde, the flight time from London to New York is longer than it was in the 1970s.

However, crypto remains one of the fastest-growing and most innovative industries in the world, perhaps second only to AI. But I always feel that our innovation speed and ambition are declining.

Part of this is an inevitable consequence of the maturation of the industry, but we also seem to be beginning to accept many technical limitations.

It seems to be an accepted fact that DeFi and DAO are no longer fully decentralized. Rather than making DeFi truly decentralized, we simply rename it to on-chain finance, and the problem is solved. It doesn’t matter that Ethereum cannot scale at L1, nor does it matter that the token economic model lacks innovation.

The market capitalization gap between $LQTY and $ENA shows that we no longer really need decentralized stablecoins, and high returns are more important.

Perhaps, with each passing cycle, our ambition to push the boundaries wanes, and with it, the crypto industry gradually becomes boring.

After all, if the token price is going up, why take the risk :)