[andrewxhill]

On your final point: really easy to raise money and the irony of centralized projects built on the stack.

Again, probably true... but to an extent. Take a look at that Chris Burniske talk I posted in the other comment. There are many things that look new in crypto, but in fact, they are just more efficient in crypto. One of them is the speed through which the value that accrues in crypto is redeployed to fund new innovations. So when we see these huge market caps of tokens, it means huge treasuries are also being deployed to fund good (and bad) ideas. This means many founders in the space can find good homes quickly, making it more competitive for external investors to access the founder pipeline. So the strong vested interest you point out is partially just the result of this wild fast loop.

I really don't see coinbase as a contradiction. It solved some pretty big pain points that web3 alone couldn't solve in the early days. Some of that will be replaced, other parts of it probably will not be replaced. It's just one piece of a puzzle.

I guess final thought related to that last point. There is a really easy mistake that founders make all the time. They look at the market or the competitors and they assess the current state, a snapshot. It's really hard to break out of that and assess that outside of us with velocity taken into account. Where will they be in x amount of time? People will sit there and point at centralized opensea as proof of web3 failure, until opensea isn't the dominant player anymore, and they will point to the next thing. But where is it all going? Where is it already that we just cannot see from the outside?

[muglug]

I'm doubtful that any of those decentralising innovations will come to pass, because the history of the web tends towards centralisation mainly because humans tend towards centralisation. The more complex the underlying technology for something becomes, the more people cling to services that make it more simple. And anything to do with crypto is very complex.