Reverse Entrepreneurship: The Next Web3 Hit May Come from Previously Failed Ideas

Reviewing failed models such as X-to-Earn, the metaverse, DAOs, and personal IP trading, old ideas are now poised for implementation.

Written by: 1confirmation

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

There are various reasons for business failures, but poor timing is the most common. Most of the currently successful companies were not the first to enter their respective markets. They rose to prominence only after infrastructure improved and user behaviors changed, making the timing right.

The crypto industry has undergone over a decade of various attempts aimed at ordinary users, leaving behind numerous failed cases for review and learning. Several previously unsuccessful directions now have the opportunity to give birth to phenomenal crypto consumer applications.

Internet Native Assets

During the NFT boom in 2021, Cent created a marketplace for tokenizing tweets. Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for 1,630 ETH (equivalent to $2,915,835.47) on March 22, 2021. NBA Top Shot also attempted to put cultural moments on-chain but ultimately packaged these contents into products that closely resembled digital trading cards.

To this day, the industry still lacks a mature solution that can effectively carry online trends and cultural moments. Many people mention meme coins, but meme coins are more like derivatives of hype and do not truly anchor the cultural events behind them.

Currently, the entire industry is buzzing about RWA, aiming to bring real-world assets like stocks, government bonds, real estate, and trading cards onto the blockchain. Perhaps a reverse approach holds greater opportunity: creating a new type of crypto-native asset that does not exist in the real world.

X-to-Earn

Projects like STEPN and Axie Infinity were once all the rage. They no longer require users to spend money to purchase crypto assets but instead provide ways for users to earn tokens.

The lesson we should take from this is not that the “play-to-earn model doesn’t work,” but rather that indiscriminate issuance of liquidity tokens cannot sustain a viable economic system.

In the future, most people will acquire their first cryptocurrency through earning rather than direct purchase. The core question is, what are users earning? And why would they be willing to hold onto it long-term?

Metaverse

Today, when people mention the term metaverse, many feel it is out of place, especially since the last hype ended poorly. Projects like Decentraland and The Sandbox attempted to replicate the real world on the internet by creating digital real estate such as land and buildings. When Facebook rebranded to Meta, the company’s market value had reached $900 billion.

The current mainstream trend in the industry is to embrace offline reality. As everyone rushes offline to explore a new generation of online social forms, interesting opportunities may arise.

The past mistakes of the metaverse may not stem from misjudging people’s willingness to immerse themselves in digital spaces; the error may lie in the stubborn belief that the virtual world must replicate the appearance of the real world.

DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)

DAOs cannot be said to have completely failed, as many projects still exist today, but they have far from realized the potential that people initially envisioned.

ConstitutionDAO is a highly representative experiment; its model is quite simple. A group of internet strangers raised about $47 million in just a few days to bid on an original copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Pooling funds to buy sports teams, invest in films, support athletes, collect historical artifacts, save local shops, fund scientific research, and purchase land... accomplishing tasks that would be difficult for an individual.

The DAO industry may be overly fixated on governance mechanisms, but the most basic need of users is simply for people on the internet to pool funds and work together.

Personal Value Assetization

This is the most well-known track on the list. A large number of products such as Friend.tech, Rally, Roll, and BitClout constitute the “graveyard of projects” in the creator economy and SocialFi era.

The underlying idea has always been similar: to create corresponding trading markets for everyone. Sometimes it takes the form of creator tokens, sometimes access passes, and sometimes uses bonding curve pricing, but no product has been able to sustain itself long-term.

In reality, people trade meme coins tied to personalities, bet on political movements, purchase athlete trading cards, and buy and sell stocks based on founders. This shows that the direction of “person-based assets” is not necessarily wrong; rather, the methods of implementation in the past have been flawed.

Traders and fans may want to establish trading markets around personalities, but do creators themselves want to be treated as trading assets? If creators are unwilling, can a trading market be built around people without turning them into commodities?

The next phenomenal crypto consumer application will not emerge from the crowded tracks everyone is currently developing. It will be an idea that failed five years ago but now finally has the necessary infrastructure and timing for success.