A couple months ago I was looking at the prices of crypto assets, and eyeballing the list it was clear to me that the big winners during crypto winter were all things that addressed current needs. That’s not too much of a shocker - in bear markets, the tolerance for risk goes down and things that are currently doing well are valued more than things with future value.
web3 is still in very nascent stages. We don’t yet have a scalable blockchain, nor do we have a data layer. We’re still trying to work out the highest and best uses, though many of the early things look like toys, to use Chris Dixon’s parlance.
The things that stood out as having done well during crypto winter are Maker, BAT, and Binance. [I don’t pretend that this is an exhaustive list, and I’m open to someone showing me statistically that I’m entirely wrong as long as the dates aren’t entirely cherry picked. I’m sure there are also some smaller things which have done quite well, but that’s not germane to this analysis.]
Binance is actually at about even in USD from crypto market top
Maker is down a bit in USD terms, but has still done quite well for crypto.
And despite the recent fall versus ETH due to internal drama, it’s still down quite well in ETH terms.
Meanwhile BAT has soared in ETH terms:
So web2.5 is a bridge. These are crypto projects but with applications in the current web. Binance is just an exchange, albeit a very well executed one with a token bearing many of the marks of a security.
BAT rides shotgun on the Brave browser, which has millions of users and gaining millions more. It really only uses its token for payments, nothing fancy. But it’s a great way to get cryptographically secured assets into the hands of people so they can understand what they are.
Maker is probably the most controversial to include in “web2.5″ but I do so because if web3 is successful, then a synthetic collateralized dollar will probably not be the default unit of account. I’m certainly not saying that synthetic assets can’t have value in the long-run, just that I would not necessarily expect quite as much of proportional value to accrue there like it has in web2.5
If we shift back into a bull market, I would expect some of these assets to perform less well as they are mostly “risk off” trades for crypto which may not perform as well in a “risk on” bull market.
* Some folks also at ConsenSys also used the web2.5 term a few weeks ago.
