The Vibe Shift

There’s a specific type of person who got into Web3 in 2021. They had a profile picture of a bored monkey. They said “gm” unironically. They called everything “alpha.” They’re mostly gone now.

Good. Now we can talk about the actual technology.

I’ve been in this space long enough to have survived multiple cycles — the highs where you feel like a genius, the crashes where you feel like a cautionary tale, and the boring middle parts where the real building happens. This is a post about the boring middle parts.

DeFi: From Casino to Infrastructure

In 2021, DeFi was basically a casino with better branding. Yield farming with 10,000% APY. Protocols that existed for three weeks before someone drained them. “Audited” contracts that somehow still got exploited.

That era is mostly over, and I’m not mourning it.

What’s left is more interesting: DeFi is quietly becoming financial infrastructure. Lending protocols that have run without incident for years. DEXs that handle billions in daily volume more reliably than some centralized exchanges. Stablecoins that have actually maintained their pegs through multiple market cycles.

It’s not sexy. It doesn’t make Twitter headlines. But it works, and that’s new.

NFTs: The Bubble Popped, the Use Cases Didn’t

NFTs became a punchline, and honestly, fair enough. The right-click-save crowd had a point about the speculative nonsense.

But the underlying mechanism — provable ownership of a digital asset, recorded on a public ledger — is genuinely useful. We’re already seeing it used for:

  • Gaming: actual ownership of in-game items that persist across games
  • Ticketing: killing scalpers and fake tickets
  • Credentials: diplomas, certifications, event attendance that can’t be faked

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re live, and they’re boring in the best way — boring because they’re just solving a problem rather than promising to make everyone rich.

Infrastructure: The Part Nobody Talks About

The most underrated story in Web3 right now is infrastructure.

Layer 2s have gotten genuinely fast and cheap. What used to cost $50 in gas and take minutes now costs cents and takes seconds. Bridges between chains, while still occasionally catastrophic, have gotten meaningfully better. Developer tooling has gone from “you need to be a masochist to build this” to “actually not that different from regular web dev.”

This matters because it removes the excuse. The old complaint was “it’s too slow and expensive for real use.” That’s increasingly not true. Which means the question is no longer can you build useful things on-chain — it’s will you bother.

What I Actually Believe

Web3 will not replace the internet. It will not make banks obsolete by Tuesday. The metaverse is not where we’re all going to live.

But: some things are genuinely better when they’re on a public, permissionless ledger. Specifically, things where you need to prove ownership, verify a record, or transact with someone you don’t trust — without a middleman you both have to trust instead.

That’s a real category. It’s not everything. It doesn’t need to be everything.

The next few years will be about figuring out which problems actually belong in that category — and quietly building the solutions. Less Twitter, more shipping.

I’m here for it.