Building Through Hell - The Daily Gwei #474
If you're building through hell, keep building.
If you were only paying attention to the markets over the last 6 or so months you would be thinking that the crypto ecosystem is “dead”. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth as plenty of projects both big and small are still busier than ever building the future of finance, coordination, public goods funding, the web and so much more.
Being a builder in crypto is really tough (especially if your project has a token) and it can be a very thankless job a lot of the time. The perfect example of this is a core developer - they mostly sit in the background with 99% of network participants having no idea who they are or how important the work they do is. Core developers are also rewarded least for their efforts while others make millions off the back of their work. And yet, they keep building because they care a lot about the work that they do and it’s also an interesting thing to spend their time on.
On a more positive note, and as you can see in the tweet above, people aren’t just building in vain - their work is getting real traction despite the “bear market”. In Dune’s case, people are still hungry to make sense of all the public blockchain data available to them so they are building queries to do just that (and at a record pace). In other cases, there’s lots of innovation happening and you’d only know about it if you’re paying attention to things like forum posts, community calls and developer AMA’s. This is where the true “alpha” lies in crypto - it doesn’t lie in scrolling through Twitter and copy-trading influencers.
Lastly, and I think most importantly, just because people are still building something during a bear market doesn’t mean that it’s going to be successful. I mean, 90%+ of startups fail in the non-crypto world and I would actually wager that this is easily 95%+ for crypto - this is what really makes it hard to invest in this industry - especially when bull markets give projects a false sense of security around product/market fit. So my non-investment advice would to be very careful when trying to “value invest” during bear markets - chances are you’ll be picking a dud even if it seems like a winner!
I feel like a broken record at this point but I really do mean it when I say the building never stops in this industry - and why would it? Bull markets would have you believe that everything is already built and there’s no problems left to solve but that couldn’t be further from the truth. At this point, what we’ve built represents a drop and what we haven’t built represents an ocean - so let’s just keep building.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.
Love it and totally true, builders keep building, they do not care about the market, they are here to change the world! When a nice post about The Graph? I'm sure you know already about the massive work that five core dev teams are doing to build a decentralized and permissionless indexing protocol for Ethereum, IPFS, and other blockchains.