Chainfeeds Preface:
Overemphasizing infrastructure innovation often neglects the monetary foundation truly needed to achieve "financial sovereignty". This bias will lead to a disconnection between technological achievements and sustainable value creation.
Article Source:
https://x.com/ohmzeus/status/1919119965858521100
Article Author:
Zeus Ω (3, 3)
Perspective:
Zeus Ω (3, 3): Crypto narratives have gone through multiple stages, but one theme has always existed: promising to build revolutionary applications beyond the financial realm. Smart contract platforms position themselves as the foundation of a "new digital economy", with value flowing back from the application layer to infrastructure. This narrative was further strengthened after the "Fat Protocol Theory" was proposed - unlike TCP/IP protocols that barely captured value, while companies like Facebook and Google earned billions, blockchain protocols themselves would accumulate most of the value. This shaped a specific mental model: public chain value comes from enabling diverse applications, similar to how Apple's App Store or Microsoft Windows create value through third-party software. However, the root problem is that the crypto industry tries to impose financialization on areas that neither need nor are suitable for it. Unlike the internet digitizing activities humans already wanted to do (e-commerce, communication, entertainment), crypto tries to introduce financial mechanisms into activities that originally didn't require them. They assume that from social media to gaming to identity management, everything would benefit from being on-chain and financialized. Reality proves otherwise: social applications introducing tokens failed to achieve mainstream adoption, with user participation mostly driven by token rewards rather than product value. Gaming applications were strongly rejected by traditional player communities who believed financialization destroyed rather than enhanced the gaming experience. Identity and reputation systems introducing token economics failed to demonstrate more compelling advantages than traditional methods. A frequently overlooked distinction in crypto discussions is that blockchain technology ≠ trustlessness. Trustlessness comes with costs - efficiency, complexity, resource consumption. Only in specific scenarios is this cost justifiable. For example, Dubai uses blockchain to record real estate primarily to improve efficiency and transparency, not to remove trust. The land department remains a trusted third party, just replacing Excel with blockchain. This distinction is crucial because it reveals the actual source of system value. In reality, only a few domains truly need trustlessness. From real estate to identity verification to supply chain management, most activities fundamentally depend on trusted institutions endorsing real-world contexts. Using blockchain as a ledger ≠ escaping trust, it's merely changing the technology.
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