April 08, 2024 | Read Online

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Vibe Check

It's no longer March but I think we all feel the madness. There's a manic energy in the room. On the one hand it's nice that it's a full room (not to brag, but DAS sold out and was a huge success).

On the other hand…

In my head, I imagined that the end of the crypto bear market would look like Sleeping Beauty as she wakes up from a long restful nap. In this metaphor, I am Sleeping Beauty and let's assume I gave consent.

But instead, it feels like we were all jolted back to life by a frantic wide-eyed teenager using a wall defibrillator and their CPR certification for the first time.

Is one way of waking up better than the other? I'm not sure. I should just be grateful to have a beating heart…but my heart is a restless and obnoxious one, so humor me as I pontificate about what the heck is going on in crypto right now.

I'm a TradFi bro at heart, so I'm going to look at the bellwether metrics first.

If you ask an economist if we're in a recession, they'll look at GDP. If you ask a crypto investor they'll likely look to Bitcoin. Our very own David Canellis wrote about Bitcoin Bull Cycles recently in our brand-new Empire Newsletter (ahem…be on that distribution).

According to him — and to Bitcoin itself — we're about 18 months into a bull run. Empirically, I take issue with this because I have been grossly unhappy for the last 18 months.

Further, I've always been suspicious of using Bitcoin as the sister-metric to GDP. GDP is supposedly representative of all that we have built as a society. Is that Bitcoin to crypto? It is absolutely a market moving bellwether, but I simply ask: Should it be?

OK, so Bitcoin says it's a bull market. Great. What else can we look at?

VC funding windows seem to be open again. That's gotta be good, right? It's good in TradTech. If VCs are spending, doesn't that mean there are good ideas worth investing in? If they're good and worthy, that must mean there's an investment thesis that involves promising metrics like ARR and TAM and CAC.

Unfortunately, if my rigorous data strategy of reading headlines and eavesdropping at conferences holds true, then consumer apps still remain a phantom idea floating in the wind.

So, if these brilliant investable ideas aren't for everyone, who are they for? Well, they're for us, of course! The infra and security echochamber continues. What does that suggest about the length of our bliss? Probably not good, but maybe not terrible. Is that helpful?

OK, VCs say bull market. What's next?

Let's look at one final metric. It's arguably the most important metric and the fact that it's the most important metric is arguably my favorite thing about working in crypto.

And that is the fundamental question: What's the vibe?

The vibe is good! And I won't even follow that statement with my usual bouquet of caveats and great points — it's just plain good!

We're having fun in crypto again.

I attended an NFT NYC week event last night that I found to be very promising. It was somehow both an exclusive guest list (flicks invisible dust from shoulder) and a full room in a large venue — again…TAM!

It was a lot of people building real things and being all grown up about it. That said, (I lied about the no caveats thing) there was still nary a mention of consumer apps, mass adoptions or grand ambitions of changing the world. If the DJ's volume hadn't been so perfectly curated to the acoustics of the space, you would have heard us echoing off the walls.

I will say, the NFT moment happening right now is nothing short of awesome. The NFT community knows how to have fun.

Those damn penguins are the cutest thing I've ever seen. I have one of the IRL plushy pudges. His name is Pudge and I hold him when the rest of crypto scares me.

I'll also have you know there was an event on Friday called Dickbutts on Ice. Dickbutts. On. Ice.

There's a group of Bad Kids saying bm ("bad morning") to each other.

And because Blockworks also knows how to have fun, we made sure all the coolest NFTs were going to be at Permissionless this year. I know I'm shameless, but I think we're the best and I care about your wellbeing so I make sure you know these things.

I care about you so much in fact that I slipped the Permissionless intern a $20 and got you a special promocode to be there: ListenToAlex20. Don't make me look stupid; buy a ticket or two.

TL;DR: the vibe check says bull market.

So where does that leave us?

Our hearts are beating (albeit perhaps manically).

Bitcoin has been going up, kept going up and will probably keep going up.

Investors are investing again.

We're getting back into rooms in our expensive hoodies, bragging to each other and most importantly selling goods and services to each other again.

We are spending $1,000 for a Dickbutt and taking ferry boats to "Gooch Island."

I don't know how long this will last but we're having fun in our office and the defibrillator is securely affixed to the wall.

― Alex Gray

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Daily Insights

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