Author: 1confirmation
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
Companies fail for many reasons, but one of the most common is timing.
The most successful companies today are often not the first ones to try a particular idea. Infrastructure gradually matures, consumer behavior shifts, and eventually, the right moment arrives.
The crypto industry has now experienced over a decade of consumer application experiments, leaving behind a vast graveyard of projects from which we can learn.
Here are some ideas that failed in the past but could now give rise to breakout consumer applications.
1. Internet-Native Assets
During the 2021 NFT craze, Cent created a marketplace for tokenizing tweets. On March 22, 2021, Jack Dorsey's first tweet sold for $2,915,835.47, or 1,630 ETH.
NBA Top Shot also attempted to put culturally significant classic moments on-chain, but ultimately, it packaged them into something that looked and felt very much like digital trading cards.
To this day, we still haven't found a truly good way to meaningfully capture attention or cultural moments on the internet.
Many think of memecoins, but memecoins are more seen as proxies for attention rather than assets that truly embody the cultural moments themselves.
Everyone is now talking about RWA, moving assets like stocks, US Treasuries, real estate, and trading cards onto the chain.
But the reverse direction might be an even bigger opportunity: Are there entirely new crypto-native assets that simply don't exist in the real world?
2. X-to-Earn
Projects like STEPN and Axie Infinity were once wildly popular, in part because they didn't require users to first buy cryptocurrency; instead, they offered a way to earn it.
We shouldn't conclude that "doing something to earn crypto" is inherently a foolish idea.
The real lesson to learn is that endlessly issuing freely tradable tokens to users is not a sustainable economic model.
In the future, most people may get their first cryptocurrency not through purchase, but through earning.
The question is, what exactly are they earning? And why would they want to continue holding it?
3. The Metaverse
Considering how poorly the last wave of the metaverse turned out, even uttering the word "metaverse" now seems almost unbelievable.
Decentraland, The Sandbox, and many others were essentially trying to recreate the physical world online, with land, buildings, and digital real estate. When Facebook renamed itself Meta, it was a company worth $900 billion.
The hottest trend now is emphasizing "building for the real world," or "build for IRL."
But if everyone is moving towards IRL, then perhaps the opposite direction is worth reconsidering: What should the next generation of "people hanging out together online" experiences actually look like?
The true mistake of the metaverse might not have been believing people were willing to spend time in digital worlds.
The problem may have simply been that we thought those digital worlds had to look like the physical world.
4. DAOs
DAOs cannot be considered a complete failure because many still exist today, but they clearly haven't reached their initially envisioned potential.
ConstitutionDAO was one of the more interesting experiments because what it did was actually much simpler.
A group of strangers on the internet raised about $47 million in a matter of days in an attempt to buy an original copy of the US Constitution.
Buying a sports team, funding a movie, supporting an athlete, purchasing a historical artifact, saving a local business, funding research, acquiring land, or collectively accomplishing anything a single person simply could not do alone.
Perhaps DAOs later became too focused on governance and overlooked a much simpler consumer behavior: a group of people on the internet pooling money to do something together.
5. People as Markets
This is the most obvious direction on this list.
Friend.tech, Rally, Roll, BitClout, and many other projects. The creator economy and SocialFi era have left a graveyard of failures.
The fundamental idea behind these products has always been some form of "creating a market for every person."
Sometimes it was creator tokens, sometimes access passes, sometimes bonding curves, but none of these models ultimately proved truly sustainable.
People trade memecoins related to an individual, bet on what a political figure will do next, buy sports cards based on athlete performance, and to some extent trade a company's stock because of its founder.
So, the idea of "people as markets" itself might not be wrong; perhaps the past implementations were just flawed.
Traders and fans might indeed want to build a market around a person, but does the creator themselves want to become a market?
If they don't, is there a way to build a market around a person without making that person themselves the product being traded?
The next truly breakout consumer crypto application will not come from what everyone is doing today.
It's likely an idea that failed five years ago, but today, the infrastructure and timing are finally right.
