You get this feeling when you browse web2 socials that it's all about money, and it is in many ways true everywhere, but I'm talking about the paradigm shift that is blockchain and crypto. We are still in the phase where we're moving towards it but a lot of the bad habits and interests are coming along with it.
The masses don't really care much what's behind the curtains as long as they're doing better or feeling like they are and having fun. I was looking into this new socialfi platform, although honestly I didn't look much into it, but I kept seeing things like "backed by coinbase", built on their blockchain base, "backed with millions by VC's", etc.
Let me ask you this, what do you think the intentions of these VC's are? Do you think they care about freedom, censorship resistence and fair value distribution?
Whenever you open your project up to investment to get it going, you give away a big part of it before it even starts. I remember way back before the FTX collapse how some ex Facebook CEO's or whatever were laughing in zoom calls talking about how cheap they got their bag of Solana and had it not been that cheap they wouldn't have gotten in. It just gives you that feeling that these projects use the names behind them as a means to strengthen their reputation at the cost of giving away stake to the project at a cent on the dollar, if not more dollars when it comes to the average joe who'll first get to buy it on exchanges at a large premium. These VC's are similar, they want profit and they want it at all cost, it is after all how they build their reputation and gather more investors themselves.
The masses will naturally follow these first, I'm seeing a lot of the same happening with gamefi too. We have millions of VC funding so we could afford ex-"popular web2 game" devs to build our "something"-verse game that's a reskin of whatever game exists on web2. We're going to make it look so shiny and nice, even spend some of our tokens we printed out of thin air to lure in gamers while we make the real profit and have them market it for us.
I feel like many forgot all the games that came forth in the last bull market and how few of them are still alive, people just don't learn.
The old saying "If you're not paying for a product, you're the product." rings true in some form but in a different way.
Here's it's more like "If you're not earning your fair share of a project, you're just being used".
I personally am not too worried about these socialfi's, most of them will either succumb to censorship in one way or another, the rest will just use their users to benefit early investors.
Don't settle for the crumbs, look for projects that want regular people to be invested long term and build something lasting where the VC's and institutions have to come to you to buy your tokens off your hands, not the other way around.
Look at the ETF for instance, you have giant institutions now buying Bitcoin at 50k a piece. A coin you've had the opportunity to buy from $200-15k from the bottoms a few cycles ago to the recent one. Don't settle for projects that already sell most of their tokens before they're even public to investment firms. I'm not saying don't profit from the cycles there, but don't get married to those positions cause they weren't started fairly and the odds aren't in your favor.
That's the norm right now, everyone just chasing profit and money. There'll be a time that'll change though. Even if they'll do everything in their power to not give you the spotlight, it is inevitable.
image generated with midjourney for this post.