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Crypto comes in waves. And like surfing, it’s entirely possible to paddle too early and miss out altogether.
Some of the biggest phenomena in crypto have caught their respective waves with precision.
Markets change…
Yuga Labs rolled out Bored Apes in April 2021, as bitcoin and ether were headed to their first major peak of that bull market cycle.
More recently, pump.fun nailed it when it deployed in January 2024 — just as SOL was about to double in price in two months on the back of bitcoin ETFs.
Both companies are now case studies in capturing and monetizing the attention of mass-market crypto consumers, even if it’s difficult to say how many individuals were directly involved with either one.
Only around 5,500 addresses have ever owned a Bored Ape NFT, and less than 12,000 have held the cheaper Mutant Apes. ApeCoin, the token meant to tie the room together, is found in many more wallets — more than 182,000 at current count, and that’s not including an untold number of exchange accounts containing APE.
Pump.fun’s active daily address count is nearly double that, ranging between 260,000 and about 500,000 trading addresses right now, per Blockworks Research data. Although, again, it’s unlikely that individual users map one-to-one with active addresses, so the true number is likely smaller.
Pump.fun has, so far, made it through 15 months of bull market.
In any case, this is about the maximum size of the playing field on which any consumer crypto app vies to compete, fielding around half a million active addresses per day at best. That’s excluding traditional crypto exchanges, whose active userbases stretch into the millions.
(Coinbase reports about 10 million active users per month, which averaged out over 30 days is actually quite similar to the lower end of pump.fun’s daily active address count, although the two aren’t directly comparable.)
Best case scenario: the playing field grows between the waves of the crypto market. It would be good news for the VCs and other investors who’ve bet that the world has enough blockchains and could now do with more useful apps running on top of them.
Until then, timing will be everything, and the ecosystem may be limited to serving niche communities of early crypto adopters. In such an environment, the consumer apps that make it will capture the attention of crypto’s hot ball of money and maintain it long enough to make stake holders comfortable (and, perhaps more preferably, profitable). Will they persist between cycles? Has Bored Apes?
…but Blockchains are forever
Blockchains and cryptocurrency can do more. I’ve previously subjected you to some thoughts on tokenomics within the context of World, and the role that well-designed, hyper-utilized token experiments could play in humanity’s future.
Zoom out. By their very nature, properly decentralized blockchain networks are intended to be immortal, lasting much longer than bull and bear markets.
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Nothing is eternal, maybe, but it can still be a goal.
Blockchains will be online for as long as there are people interested in running the machines that serve as validating nodes on the network, and the modern-day blockchain space is built on incentivizing those people to continue doing so with valuable tokens.
It could be that the current narrative bent towards consumer apps over infrastructure is missing the forest for the trees, particularly when it comes to gaming.
Potential gaming applications
Stop Killing Games is a consumer movement that hopes to sway studios and publishers from snuffing out games from their back catalogue, most of which tend to be online-only these days. Games are routinely made unavailable for good when the company responsible decides the overhead costs of the relevant server is, economically, not worth the squeeze.
