Hackathons have changed completely.
You are now most likely not competing for money but for the chance to make money in the long run. That is understandable: most hackathons were won by “bounty hunters,” people who did not want to build the product and only wanted a quick cash grab- literal bounty hunters. That hurt hackathons, and chains have realized there are few incentives left for hosting them. Now hackathons are focused on taking your idea (or MVP) to a real product that generates revenue and has users. That is a better approach in the long term because you reward people who are building real solutions and want to build for the long term, instead of people who build only to collect a check and say goodbye.
Grants have disappeared.
Most grant programs have disappeared completely, but many of the chains that gave those grants have not stopped making revenue, so the funds are still there. What I imagine is that grants will focus on key tooling (compilers, frameworks, etc.) and on already existing protocols, which makes a lot of sense. Grants were used to bootstrap ideas; how many successful ideas did they bootstrap? A really small number. Now you have to put yourself out there first, and then you can get the money to keep going, which rewards builders in the long term.
Blockchains are (finally) becoming just part of the stack, not the unique selling point.
Let me explain: in the early 2020s, protocols were valued at millions (millions!!) just because they were the only ones doing X on Y blockchain. That was misguided. Blockchains should always have been an implementation detail, not the USP. For example, look at something like Polymarket: do people using Polymarket know they are on Polygon? No. Most of them do not even know they are using a blockchain, and that was the end goal all along. The blockchain should just be part of the stack. Users do not care which blockchain you are building on; they care about the product. You (the developer) are the one who should care, but the end user should not. Good examples of this are Hyperliquid, Polymarket, and USDT.
Liquidity is going to concentrate.
In the next couple of years, we are going to see a lot of protocols and chains close and wind down. That is a good thing in the long term, but it is going to signal a new age in crypto. Protocols with no purpose or use case are going to become irrelevant, which, if you think about it, is exactly what happens in every industry. For example, I never saw the use case for POAPs. A lot of people seem shaken by the news of them discontinuing the product, but in reality, the product was overvalued.
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