This post nails why experiences like trying to ingest 10M+ Florida property records on-chain (as open, verifiable RWAs) ended up “breaking” a general-purpose chain—we became its largest data writer by far, gas costs skyrocketed, and artificial caps had to kick in. It wasn’t a flaw in the tech; it highlighted that we’re still in those messy foundational years where finance builds the onchain population, liquidity, and trust layers first. Non-financial (but deeply economic) use cases like massive-scale real-world asset data hit the current infrastructure’s limits hard because it wasn’t architected for that volume or pattern.
The order-of-operations point resonates strongly: overload the primitives before they’re ready for broader categories, and you get exactly these revealing “failures.” Treating them as groundwork rather than dead ends is what makes the obvious years possible. Curious how others see policy shifts (like market structure legislation) helping bridge from the financial proving ground to things like RWAs at true scale.
Grateful for the framing—it’s permission to keep building through the mess.
Interesting take on where blockchain stands today. In my view, blockchain hasn’t really taken off outside a narrow set of financial use cases, also because innovation and scalability haven’t kept up.
Blockchain is about trust at execution time. But if you want trust at internet scale, scalability isn’t optional. You need real throughput, low latency, predictable costs, and systems that work under real-world load. And the industry didn’t help itself. As you said, years of scams, extractive incentives, greed, and arrogance damaged credibility and pulled attention away from the hard engineering work. At IPPAN, we kept building anyway, focusing on the original promise: a global infrastructure engine for verifiable execution, an AI-era coordination layer and a settlement rail that can operate at scale, with innovative and breakthrough results. If blockchain is going to matter beyond finance, it’s time to optimize for execution, proof, and scale.
Just like how Vine was too early and TikTok succeeded, all these other categories of apps (social, gaming, AI) will blow up once mainstream has onboarded.
The next Farcaster or Web3 Youtube may be an incredible opportunity waiting for someone to build it at the right time.
We’re not only still early for investing, but also building.
Well said finance is the foundation that onboards users, builds trust, and enables the primitives non-financial crypto use cases will later scale on . would you be open to exploring a collaboration or partnership with teams building real-world financial infrastructure around this long-term vision?
This clip still hits. Regulators keep saying “show us the use cases” because they can’t write rules for what they can’t picture. My only hope: we don’t set the wrong guardrails now and lock the next decade in place.
I’ve spent more than 25 years operating inside decentralized communities. I’m living full-time in one right now. I’m not talking about theory. I’m talking about how these systems actually work when people have to live inside them every day.
What I’ve seen over and over is this: decentralized systems don’t fail because the technology isn’t powerful enough. They fail because they don’t have the basic cultural infrastructure people need to participate meaningfully and to coordinate without friction.
We keep building things in the wrong order.
In tech, we’re trained to build downstream. Downstream means apps, features, interfaces, things you can ship fast. That works when there’s already structure in place. It works when identity is clear, coordination is handled, and people already know how to participate.
In decentralized ecosystems, it’s the missing layer. And what you’re building isn’t the app. The thing you’re building is the environment people have to operate inside. If that environment doesn’t support participation and coordination, everything built on top of it stays fragile.
Upstream work is different from downstream work. It’s not about speed. It’s not about features. It’s about answering basic questions first. How do people enter the system? How do they know where they belong? How do they coordinate without a central authority? How does work continue when one person leaves? How do people stay involved without burning out?
These are not soft questions. They are design problems.
But builders are conditioned to work downstream. They’re rewarded for shipping, not for building the systems that make participation possible. So cultural infrastructure gets ignored. It doesn’t look like a product. It doesn’t have immediate payoff. It gets treated like overhead.
The result is predictable. Participation stays shallow. When incentives change, people leave. Context disappears. Trust breaks. The system has to start over.
This keeps happening because we don’t treat cultural infrastructure as real infrastructure.
As a creator, I don’t see technology as just a tool. I see it as a medium. And mediums need structure before expression. You can’t build culture on top of chaos and expect it to last.
If we want decentralized systems that actually work, we have to build upstream first. We have to design for participation and coordination before we scale anything. And we have to understand that culture isn’t decoration. It’s what makes systems usable, stable, and real for the people inside them.
Until that changes, we’re going to keep building the same systems that look exciting at first and fall apart later.
Imagine a world where everyone has a wallet, it's much easier and natural for people start chatting with their friends onchain when all their friends. Instagram, uber, doordash only become reality when almost everyone has a smartphone today. Good things can wait.
This post nails why experiences like trying to ingest 10M+ Florida property records on-chain (as open, verifiable RWAs) ended up “breaking” a general-purpose chain—we became its largest data writer by far, gas costs skyrocketed, and artificial caps had to kick in. It wasn’t a flaw in the tech; it highlighted that we’re still in those messy foundational years where finance builds the onchain population, liquidity, and trust layers first. Non-financial (but deeply economic) use cases like massive-scale real-world asset data hit the current infrastructure’s limits hard because it wasn’t architected for that volume or pattern.
The order-of-operations point resonates strongly: overload the primitives before they’re ready for broader categories, and you get exactly these revealing “failures.” Treating them as groundwork rather than dead ends is what makes the obvious years possible. Curious how others see policy shifts (like market structure legislation) helping bridge from the financial proving ground to things like RWAs at true scale.
Grateful for the framing—it’s permission to keep building through the mess.
Soofi
There are onchain products that are good for publishing blogs like this. Fred Wilson is using one.
Interesting take on where blockchain stands today. In my view, blockchain hasn’t really taken off outside a narrow set of financial use cases, also because innovation and scalability haven’t kept up.
Blockchain is about trust at execution time. But if you want trust at internet scale, scalability isn’t optional. You need real throughput, low latency, predictable costs, and systems that work under real-world load. And the industry didn’t help itself. As you said, years of scams, extractive incentives, greed, and arrogance damaged credibility and pulled attention away from the hard engineering work. At IPPAN, we kept building anyway, focusing on the original promise: a global infrastructure engine for verifiable execution, an AI-era coordination layer and a settlement rail that can operate at scale, with innovative and breakthrough results. If blockchain is going to matter beyond finance, it’s time to optimize for execution, proof, and scale.
Just like how Vine was too early and TikTok succeeded, all these other categories of apps (social, gaming, AI) will blow up once mainstream has onboarded.
The next Farcaster or Web3 Youtube may be an incredible opportunity waiting for someone to build it at the right time.
We’re not only still early for investing, but also building.
Interesting
Well said finance is the foundation that onboards users, builds trust, and enables the primitives non-financial crypto use cases will later scale on . would you be open to exploring a collaboration or partnership with teams building real-world financial infrastructure around this long-term vision?
This clip still hits. Regulators keep saying “show us the use cases” because they can’t write rules for what they can’t picture. My only hope: we don’t set the wrong guardrails now and lock the next decade in place.
https://substack.com/@kylestoflet/note/c-213280893?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=29eron
I’ve spent more than 25 years operating inside decentralized communities. I’m living full-time in one right now. I’m not talking about theory. I’m talking about how these systems actually work when people have to live inside them every day.
What I’ve seen over and over is this: decentralized systems don’t fail because the technology isn’t powerful enough. They fail because they don’t have the basic cultural infrastructure people need to participate meaningfully and to coordinate without friction.
We keep building things in the wrong order.
In tech, we’re trained to build downstream. Downstream means apps, features, interfaces, things you can ship fast. That works when there’s already structure in place. It works when identity is clear, coordination is handled, and people already know how to participate.
In decentralized ecosystems, it’s the missing layer. And what you’re building isn’t the app. The thing you’re building is the environment people have to operate inside. If that environment doesn’t support participation and coordination, everything built on top of it stays fragile.
Upstream work is different from downstream work. It’s not about speed. It’s not about features. It’s about answering basic questions first. How do people enter the system? How do they know where they belong? How do they coordinate without a central authority? How does work continue when one person leaves? How do people stay involved without burning out?
These are not soft questions. They are design problems.
But builders are conditioned to work downstream. They’re rewarded for shipping, not for building the systems that make participation possible. So cultural infrastructure gets ignored. It doesn’t look like a product. It doesn’t have immediate payoff. It gets treated like overhead.
The result is predictable. Participation stays shallow. When incentives change, people leave. Context disappears. Trust breaks. The system has to start over.
This keeps happening because we don’t treat cultural infrastructure as real infrastructure.
As a creator, I don’t see technology as just a tool. I see it as a medium. And mediums need structure before expression. You can’t build culture on top of chaos and expect it to last.
If we want decentralized systems that actually work, we have to build upstream first. We have to design for participation and coordination before we scale anything. And we have to understand that culture isn’t decoration. It’s what makes systems usable, stable, and real for the people inside them.
Until that changes, we’re going to keep building the same systems that look exciting at first and fall apart later.
Imagine a world where everyone has a wallet, it's much easier and natural for people start chatting with their friends onchain when all their friends. Instagram, uber, doordash only become reality when almost everyone has a smartphone today. Good things can wait.