The playbook to launch a token is dead. The market that once had a few hundred investment opportunities now has a few million. Liquidity has consolidated and risk tolerance is waning. This presents two truths to founders thinking about building in crypto:
- Competition is fiercer than ever before. Crypto is no longer just for innovators. Distribution gets attention, attention drives usage, and usage drives revenue. This isn’t to say that the best technology can’t win, but it is to suggest that the best technology needs more time and capital than most people have, and mediocre technology with better distribution has a head start.
- The upside to finding product market fit in new niches is larger than ever. You either need to win in the existing markets against incumbents or create new ones. We’re witnessing a great migration of innovators from crypto to other markets for this reason, but they walked so we could run.
One tailwind, however, is the new momentum towards favorable token regulation worldwide. Governments are warming up to the idea that commerce is borderless and needs borderless money. Launching tokens no longer requires hundreds of thousands of dollars and a team of lawyers. Anybody just needs an idea and an internet connection.
With this in mind, let’s play out some of the game theory with a metaphor: If more people can build products and launch tokens, more people will, and more people will compete for attention. This makes the atmosphere thicker, and as a result, the necessary escape velocity to get out of it is moving further and further away. If you don’t believe me, sell to insiders, buy off KOLs, exchanges, and market makers, and pour money into marketing spend. All for a flash of attention and maybe an article or two. And launch. Liftoff, except you didn’t just launch a rocket to the moon. You launched a golden trashcan without enough fuel nor physics to avoid the inevitable fall back to reality. This isn’t a prediction; it’s history.
The world is changing, the game is changing, and opportunities along with them. Our rockets no longer need gold, and they need to be rockets, not trashcans. “History rarely repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” The scales are tipping back towards the Satoshis of the world with singular or small teams and a desire to use crypto for genuine needs, and it’s sustainable, too.
Regardless of how many people understand the Permaweb Index, nobody can refute its success in helping to bootstrap teams from zero while also leveling the playing field between insiders and users. In a hostile market and thick atmosphere, fair launching a token offers a new lifeline to founders interested in building on the new, permanent web.
We want $WNDR to serve as a prime example of how a token can connect and bind an ecosystem of apps, people, and partners like the Wander Network, but we hope it also demonstrates that fair launches and the Permaweb Index represent the future of how tokens should be launched.
The rockets that put the first man on the moon won’t be the rockets taking us to mars.
