In Defense of Exponentials

I used to tell founders, the reaction you are going to get to your launch is not hate, it’s indifference. By default, nobody cares about your new chain. I have to stop telling them that now. Monad just launched this week, and I’ve never seen so much hate about a blockchain that just launched. I’ve been investing into crypto professionally for 7+ years now. Before 2023, almost every chain I’ve ever seen that launched was mostly met with enthusiasm or indifference. But now, new chains are born into a chorus of hate. The amount of haters I’ve seen for projects like Monad, Tempo, MegaETH—before they even hit mainnet—is a genuinely new phenomenon. I’ve been trying to diagnose: why is this happening now, and what does it mean about the psychology of this market? The Cure is Worse than the Disease Forewarning: this is going to be the vaguest blockchain valuation post you ever read. I don’t have any fancy metrics or charts to sell you on. Instead, I’ll be arguing against the zeitgeist of Crypto Twitter, which for the last couple of years, I’ve been constantly on the opposite side of. In 2024, I felt like what I was arguing against was financial nihilism. Financial nihilism is the belief that none of these assets matter, it’s all memes at the end of the day, and everything we’ve built is inherently worthless. Thankfully, that’s no longer the vibe. We have broken out of that spell. But the zeitgeist now is what I’d call financial cynicism: OK, maybe some of this stuff has value