Lessons from 10 Years in Crypto

F*ck...I'm old

I read too many “2024 Prediction” posts that overlapped with my own, so I’m instead writing a retrospective. My journey in crypto started in 2013, so I’ve officially been working in this space for ten years. During that time, I’ve switched careers twice (lawyer → consultant → startup) and worked with every shape and size of company there is, from one guy with an idea to the largest international banks.

Here are ten lessons I learned along the way:

1. The idealists are always the early adopters. The non-ideological, business and product-minded people are the ones that take it mainstream though.   

2. 99.9% of crypto investors, unless they’re just holding BTC or ETH, are at an information disadvantage. Because the other 0.1% are attending conferences, talking with teams, and researching constantly. If that’s not your game, don’t try to compete. You’re the patsy.

3. “Decentralization” usually just means more expensive and worse user experience. It can also be a narrative more than it is a reality. Most projects and infrastructure roles (staking, block building) are far more centralized than you think. Nevertheless, actual decentralization is still worth striving for, particularly at the base layers.

4. Regulators are in most cases incredibly thoughtful, and just trying to do what they think is right. Even Gary.

5. Governments are good at monetary policy. Tech companies are good at product development and implementation. As it relates to stablecoins, we should let both parties do what they’re best at. 

6. The moment you tokenize something on a blockchain, it immediately has global distribution via the Internet. That’s powerful. Stablecoins are probably the best example of this. The US dollar was already the world’s reserve currency, but stablecoins are ensuring that US dollar stability is accessible in literally every corner and crevice of the world. 

7. This space moves incredibly fast, but tech innovation in general is also just accelerating. Humans aren’t wired for this pace of change, and it causes anxiety.

8. We’re still early. The infrastructure stack is still changing month to month. There’s still only one real public crypto company (Coinbase), and the most dominant blockchain ecosystem (Ethereum) still has massive scaling challenges. 

9. Institutional adoption is really slow. I remember talking with a friend in 2014 and saying “institutions are right around the corner”. It took another 10 years for a Bitcoin ETF. 

10. “Moving fast and breaking things” is fine until what you’re building works and gets big. Then the mission changes to “move slow and don’t break anything”. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the best examples of this. Changes to both take years to debate, build and implement, as they should. 

If you’ve learned other lessons along your journey, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading,

Andy

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