The blockchain industry should never go stale, but something’s off. What used to feel wide open is getting squeezed by prediction markets and memecoins. That can’t be the whole story.
When I first ran into Web3, CryptoKitties were a thing, NFTs were everywhere, and DeFi was exploding. You could seriously imagine building the next decentralized stablecoin, the next onchain collectible, the next lending protocol, with millions of people actually using the chain.
Then a lot changed. Thousands of protocols never shipped. Thousands more faded away. And many of the same names that have been here forever seem to have stopped pushing new ideas.
People stopped caring, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. We can still build a better future for blockchains; we just need new onchain experiences: less speculation, more real use cases, more things that hold up over time.
Developers need a web3-first mindset.
What I mean: build truly permissionless, trustless protocols- protocols anyone can extend and compose on without an API key- a better use of blockchain tech. Onchain experiments need to feel exciting again. We need novel DeFi, new onchain games, etc. And goes without saying, we should also revisit older ideas that faded because of tech limits or market cycles. Bring that energy back.
Projects like COINS by @z0r0zzz are exactly the kind of direction that’s interesting and has real room to grow.
We should build applications people want to use, applications that use what blockchains are uniquely good at. The old excuse list is shorter now: many technical limitations are gone, and we have the tooling to make UX genuinely smooth.
How much value have something like ve(3,3) & Solidly added to DeFi? Something like Aave? Something like Uniswap Hooks? We need that... but times ten.
I’ll go further: we should bring decentralized algorithmic stablecoins back into the conversation; the current landscape still isn’t good enough.
To be clear: I’m not telling anyone to dump their life savings into a random DeFi protocol coded in a basement with two fever dreams and a chatbot.
I am saying we should give serious experiments a fair shot, because something real can still come out of them.
The industry has centered itself on speculation. Crypto can do more, and even where speculation exists, we can still aim for setups that are more decentralized, more trustless, with stronger game theory, and less extractive.
TLDR: Make onchain experiments cool again. Build with a web3-first developer mentality. Explore new ideas, and revive old ones worth another look.
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