A 3 letter word. A power-packed meaning. A lot of money lost and opportunities left by the wayside.
FUD is an interesting thing in this world. Many people allow it to drive their decision making - especially when it comes to investing and being a part of something.
Fear creeps in at the worst moments. To use an outside example, Thorchain was pushing all-time highs at $20+ just a few months ago.
A hack took place where millions of dollars were stolen from the protocol. The protocol recovered and went back online. Another hack occured.
Then, the worst happened... a Third hack. Another outage and a revolving door of FUD set in that was so loud, people ran for the exits.
RUNE crashed from $20 to $3.. It didn't remain at $3 for long... The Diamond Hands of the Thorchain community realized that FUD was temporary and they could become Thorchads by picking up RUNE so cheap.
When you know something is great - from a fundamental level - you cure FUD.
When you believe in a mission, a project and a team so deeply, FUD is irrelevant. In fact, FUD can be a path to greatness if you know how to leverage it.
I was one of the people who bought RUNE at $3-6 when FUD dragged it off its all-time highs. In those moments, people on Twitter and in Discord were claiming that Thorchain was a dead-chain project. That it was vaporware and headed nowhere.
Belief cures FUD and gives you the clarity to make life-changing returns. A lack of belief is the oxygen that FUD uses to manifest and become the downfall of emotionally-driven investors and community members.
...But this isn't about Thorchain. This is about a post I just saw in my feed while I was sitting for a Coffee and testing the mobile app today.
We had a record turnout in yesterday's AMA. A lot of amazing people showed up and we had a lot of fun. We did everything from dev updates to picking a contest winner for "Khal's new AMA Background image" to answering the normal AMA questions.
One AMA Question stuck out: "Is LeoFinance Spreading too Thin With All These Apps and Developments?"
A question that we've seen multiple times this year. But a Question that is extremely important to ask.
Below is my response to 
Emotions will drive you to the brink of disaster.
FUDsters look only at price action to dictate the success of something. FUDsters live in the comments of Thorchain's Twitter handle. They talk about how the project is dead because RUNE went from $20 to $3.
FUDsters Don't:
That last one reminds me of that meme with the guy with all the gold chains "I'm in it for the technology"...
Some of us actually are in it for the technology. Money's important too but when you derive your decision making from the perspective of "money is everything" you can be led to some pretty toxic and depressing places wen number doesn't go up in the short-term.
I'm here for the technology and even more importantly; for our Community. Neal, Mitch and I have talked about this on the "Roundtable Podcasts" many times in the past...
F you money is the type of money that has been made by people who've been in crypto this long and held on to projects they truly believed in with massively deep levels of conviction.
While we could go out and live on a beach, retired and living well beyond our prior means just sitting in stablecoin LPs or renting out Splinterlands NFTs... I'd much rather be here, in the trenches and building something more important. I'm here for the next 10 years. The FUDsters are barely here for the next 10 minutes.
I can understand the concern about spreading too thin but if you think in a tiny box, you’ll go tiny places.
Massive projects become massive by attracting ever-wider sets of users.
Even use Splinterlands as a local example: Splinterlands has exceeded the userbase of Hive. You can’t exceed the user base of Hive if you only build on Hive. Hive is great but everyone knows you need to build outside of it to bring people back into it - Hive is the base layer technology. Not the end-all-be-all of what we can achieve. Splinterlands also shows this by using Hive for Game TXs but BSC for their governance token and nearly all of their major financial outfacing activity.
IMO we tapped out the potential growth of LeoFinance within only the Hive community a long time ago. Nearly everyone on Hive knows what LeoFinance is and we’re quite frankly the largest community on Hive.
Look back to the explosive growth of LeoFinance. We’re much larger now than 1 year ago. The token price is more than 10x higher than it was 18 months ago. We had only 4-6 people working on the project 18 months ago… now we have 20 people with 8 of those new hires being in the last 4 months.
We delivered CubFinance this year and 3 major iterations to it - kingdoms is an entirely new platform with all new smart contracts.
We delivered LeoMobile this year. A massive, 12-month long undertaking that finally came to life and approved in app stores 1 month ago.
We delivered bLEO and LeoBridge.
We delivered Lightning V2 which made LeoFinance faster than ever.
We delivered LeoInfra V3 last week which allows Facebook Hive Lite accounts - something no other app on Hive has been able to achieve thus far.
And so many others…
Edit: We delivered Hivestats V3 less than a week ago because we hired on a new dev and were able to further expand our team.
Those who look long-term, see long-term. They see what's happening fundamentally outside of only the price. IMO, LeoFinance has delivered far more in 2021 than anyone even thought possible in 2019 or 2020.
Those who look short-term, see short-term. They see only what's happening to the price or what's "in the news today". They're akin to those hysterical Covid-scared people who watch the news and sway their opinion because of one thing one news anchor said that one time.
People love to have short-term memories and use only the token price to dictate whether something is successful. I choose to focus on our fundamental growth - focusing on growing our team has been my #1 duty this year and I’ve overseen the hiring of 12 new team members in 2021 alone.
We crushed it in 2021 and we’ll crush it again and even harder in 2022. If anyone doubts that, there are other projects they can flock to. My concern and focus is not on token price but on fundamental developments and expansion. The iteration of and expansion of LeoFinance and our applications is what matters to me. 💎🐾s are the only ones who will make it to the promised land all the weak paws will fall away and come crawling back once they realize they landed on the wrong side of history.
