I'm in a similar spot. Did deep dives on tokens that didn't seem as speculative, and had specific purposes (AAVE, Ripple, etc.). Even in those cases, where there was quantifiable economic value - it didn't make sense. For example, speculation on the AAVE token that was strictly for governance and staking with returns paid in AAVE, which has no economic value other than staking, and price isn't strictly tied to the economic value derived from the network, but rather decoupled from the AAVE token itself. Read the Reddit/Twitter posts and everyone assumed the token and usage were tied - which as far as I could tell was not the case.
Gary Gensler has a similar outlook, taught a class at MIT about crypto and that was one of the main takeaways. He's generally bullish on the far future, but repeats these two questions often, and most tokens/concepts fail one or both:
1. Does this **need** to be on a blockchain? Why does it need to be secure, distributed, consensus-building, AND publicly visible? Most projects only need 1-2 aspects, and there are significant trade-offs when you build it on blockchain regardless - speed, cost, complexity, etc.
2. If it does need to be built, how do the economics work?
I'm in a similar spot. Did deep dives on tokens that didn't seem as speculative, and had specific purposes (AAVE, Ripple, etc.). Even in those cases, where there was quantifiable economic value - it didn't make sense. For example, speculation on the AAVE token that was strictly for governance and staking with returns paid in AAVE, which has no economic value other than staking, and price isn't strictly tied to the economic value derived from the network, but rather decoupled from the AAVE token itself. Read the Reddit/Twitter posts and everyone assumed the token and usage were tied - which as far as I could tell was not the case.
Gary Gensler has a similar outlook, taught a class at MIT about crypto and that was one of the main takeaways. He's generally bullish on the far future, but repeats these two questions often, and most tokens/concepts fail one or both:
1. Does this **need** to be on a blockchain? Why does it need to be secure, distributed, consensus-building, AND publicly visible? Most projects only need 1-2 aspects, and there are significant trade-offs when you build it on blockchain regardless - speed, cost, complexity, etc.
2. If it does need to be built, how do the economics work?
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s12-blockchain-and-money-fall-2018/index.htm