Dream BIG or NGMI
And projects with big ambitions to make ppl dream.
It's 2032:
You wake up slightly tired at the Four Seasons Hotel. Two Negronis from last night are still pounding your head.
A notification: Checking your Rabby wallet on the iPhone 23 XXL. BTC is down 3% overnight. Sailor’s Strategy FUD again.
Still, BTC trades at $1.2M. You smile. That crazy Udi was right!
You retired your bloodline after buying in “late” at $114k with 3x leverage on Hyperliquid.
Although Cobie was slightly off: the hard road was from 80k to 250k. The easy road went from $250k to $1m.
Yet 2024-29 bull run was indeed different: the year that 4-year cycles ended, and you weren’t liquidated on your 3x leverage trade. Thanks to Trump's third term, the US has acquired 5% of the BTC supply.
A small regret creeps in: I’d have so much more if I hadn’t sold some ETH for OpenAI and SpaceX private equity back then. Neither ever IPO’d. They tokenized straight onto NASDAQ’s Ethereum L2.
Still, tokenized private equity served you well as collateral on Aave & Fluid.
You can’t stop but dream bigger:
Monad mainnet launch and the airdrop from testnet coming soon. Once it drops, you’ll buy that second home in Antigua and Barbuda. And the passport with it. You’ll need it when the EU-wide 50% solidarity crypto tax kicks in next year.
Still, your friends weren’t so lucky.
The Financial Times and BBC experts convinced them to hold EUR-CBDC in the EU Defense Bonds at 4% APR, chasing a deposit for a one-bed apartment. With the inflation of 8% and even with 2500 EUR monthly Universal Basic Income, the goalpost keeps moving further away.
You feel sad, but it’s not your fault: you told them to buy crypto. They didn’t listen.
Anyway, you dress up. Brush your teeth. Open the X app. Uggghhh! A notification pops up: “Please verify your age with a government-issued ID to log in.”
Shit. Your VPN is down again. Set the IP location to Afghanistan and open the X app again. Success!
Visiting your friends in the UK really hits different.
Time to do some ‘work’ before flying back home.
Crypto Sells Dreams
Crypto's strongest selling point is its ability to inspire dreams of a better, richer life.
The message is especially strong and contrasts in the current geopolitical, economic sentiment where people are struggling to pay bills, find jobs, and feel their privacy is eroding (e.g., UK Online Safety Act).
When you read news, TikTok, Insta, hopelessness dominates the feed.
Yet, the vibes on Crypto Twitter are great. Crypto and Bitcoin are a solution to your financial woes. That’s why my 2032 intro story includes the plight of your non-crypto friends.
Coinbase gets it and nails the messaging.
I LOLed at their “Everything is Fine” ad on the state of the UK, but they aren’t wrong.
Truly, I love crypto because it’s a place to dream BIG. Unfortunately, that’s one reason crypto skeptics dislike us.
They don’t believe in our stories. They are too far-fetched and unrealistic. How can blockchain change the society? It’s just a ‘gloried spreadsheet’.
As Nat Friedman said “Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money.”
Crypto’s ability to dream big (and permissionless tech) is also a reason scammers love our industry: scammers sell richer life but they end up destroying it.
I wrote a dedicated post on why many hate crypto so much.
Why Everyone Hates Crypto—And How We Fix It
It’s surprising how little crypto impacts life outside of our crypto communities.
But I’m not a scammer. You are not a scammer.
We genuinely believe crypto can positively impact 1) your life, and 2) society by reinforcing private property, freedom, and privacy in finance and on the internet.
However, even though crypto has achieved a lot in the few years of existence, I feel that crypto people are forgetting how to dream big.
Everyone Here Forgot How to Dream
Our big dreams used to attract retail.
But why would new retail buy ETH if crypto natives haven't updated their $ETH price target of $10k since the last bull run?
Yet so much progress ETH has done: Spot ETFs, Tradfi adoption, Stablecoins, regulation, RWA, Robinhood launching an L2…
All this for a 2x or a 3x flip?
Perhaps we wanted to be taken seriously at last, so when TradFi joined, the dreams of Lambos and "to the moon" leaving crypto story telling.
Now, only the dumb coins (XRP, ADA, etc.) and Bitcoin attract dreamers. BTC at least promises a path to $1m.
ETH and (most) altcoins aren’t selling big dreams.
Yet there’s hope for ETH to recover.
For years, Ethereans pushed the “Ultrasound” meme. But scaling lowered gas fees, which killed the deflation dream. (Tech and shilling teams failed to sync!).
Now the narrative is back to the basics: institutional adoption, stablecoins, RWAs.
It’s not new, but this time it’s being told by louder, more credible voices like Thomas Lee and Joseph Lubin.
Who tells the story matters as much as the story itself.
Public companies adding ETH to their balance sheets is another catalyst. It gives sidelined buyers confidence. Even the bears are starting to admit the shift is working.
But all this for just a $10k ETH target?
ETH needs to find a sexier story for HODLing ETH itself to go beyond $10k. BTC is digital gold, and $ETH…. digital oil?
I know that story will appear. Bullish ETH.
Or take Solana.
It thrived in 2024 by selling a rags-to-riches story with memecoins. But as memecoin traders overwhelmingly lost money, the Solana and $SOL lost its lure.
$SOL isn’t a tradfi chain like ETH, store of value like BTC, and people losing money on memecoins isn’t making people dream anymore.
How to Make People Dream
“When I buy a token, I want to DREAM BIG.
Yet most projects focus on selling their features rather than their grand ambitions.
Token is there to make your community dream.” - DefiIgnas on X.
Looking back, it’s amazing how ChainLink’s $LINK, ! an oracle protocol! could make us all dream BIG.
I was thinking to myself:
“LINK is the most egalitarian thing we've ever seen. It's insanely ambitious, and if it works, can really reshape the fabric of society.” - Popular Copy Pasta
Or take any Compound’s COMP. What was so exciting about a lending protocol? Or a DEX aggregator? A cross-chain protocol?
These tokens were inspiring because they were part of a bigger movement: DeFi. Be your own bank, and if you don’t like the direction the team is taking, vote with your tokens in a DAO and make impact!
Revolutionary!
Now, people don’t believe in DAOs, and DeFi tokens are just a investment assets valued by revenue/fees they accrue. Devoid of sexy stories.
When LINK, COMP, UNI, YFI launched, they were DeFi market leaders, pioneers, first-movers.
Something totally new.
Now, yet another a new DEX, lending protocol, oracle, or infra project struggles to inspire us or make us dream big.
That’s the price of crypto becoming a maturing asset class?
Very few new project or TGE announcements on X feel exciting because these projects either offer minor upgrades to current market leaders or involve founders and VCs launching tokens for personal BIG DREAM profit, not for their community.
My advice to project founders: Invest time and money to build a coherent story and convey big dreams through storytelling. Marketing isn’t just paid technical threads on X, nice UI, and a few memes via your social media manager.
It’s really hard work but it will make you stand out.
Investors seek BIG DREAMS to support. However, those selling big dreams often lack the technical innovation to back them or are outright grifters.
Having said so, here a few projects that do great at selling big dreams (but aren’t necessarily the best projects).
Projects & Tokens Good at Selling Big Dreams
SPX6900
Honestly, I’ve still not sure what the token does. It’s just a meme, right?
Yet, Murad is a great story teller and the token is up by ~15k%.
His pinged post on X sells “150 Reasons Why SPX6900 will reach $1 Trillion in Market Capitalization.”
That’s 2x more than the current $ETH MC! Outrageous, absurd?
Maybe but who cares. He makes his community dream.
Sure, you might think it's a bit scammy, but he's HODLing those tokens, unlike others who quickly dump on their community.
Crypto founders have a lot to learn from him.
Disclaimer: I’m not holding the token.
Pudgy Penguins
Pudgies are my absolute favorite crypto brand.
And what’s not to like: they are cute, go up in price (I bought my NFT at $2k USD), and their mission is spreading good vibes across the meta.
With billions of views on social media, Pudgy Penguins have the best chance of becoming the face of crypto to the outside world.
Importantly, $PENGU is the No 1. crypto native memecoin while other memecoins (DOGE, PEPE, SHIBA) are imports from the Web2.
Thus, pudgies are our public relations agents to fix our negative image.
Worldcoin
You can dislike their creepy AI scanning orb, or extractive tokenomics but you can’t deny one thing: their ambition.
World Proof of Human's mission is to build a globally identity and financial network to distinguish humans from AI online while promoting global economic participation.
That’s the core of the crypto mission, too.
Farcaster
Farcaster's X bio is perhaps the least ambitious-sounding bio you'll find for any crypto project: "A sufficiently decentralized social network."
“Sufficiently decentralized” doesn’t sound ambitious. But Farcaster quietly is.
It’s building an open social network that works. Like X but censorship resistant and user owned.
Instead of putting everything onchain and killing UX, it only decentralizes what matters: usernames, messages, and the ability to read/write on the network.
That’s enough to guarantee freedom, without the disadvantages of full decentralization.
Anyone can build apps on top. No one can deplatform you. Sure, some front-end UIs of Farcaster protocol can ban you, but users can move to another platform.
Base integrating it natively in their newest Base app proves that Farcaster approach just works.
Can’t wait for the token.
Hyperliquid
An obvious one.
Yet, I wasn’t a true believer until OKx + Binance tried to destroy Hyperliquid.
Now, HYPE is a movement to move all trading from CEX to DEX.
To overtake Binance. Isn’t that ambitious and make you dream?
HL is already strong in perps, but I believe they will grow stronger in spot markets.
Hyperliquid.
Polymarket
Making a false claim or spreading fake news requires little money or time.
But answering questions like "Do vaccines cause autism?" demands billions in research funding and extensive time.
Truth is indeed costly. In this world filled with fake news and AI slob, finding out what's truly happening is more valuable than ever.
Polymarket proved its place after predicting the US election results better than the legacy media.
That’s why Polymarket is one of the protocols that make me dream big. Hope for their token airdrop soon.
Liquity
Most have given up on building a true decentralized stablecoin after the Terra collapse.
Maker pivoted to tradfi/RWA.
Even Rai, non-fiat stablecoin pivoted despite being promoted by Vitalik Buterin.
Liquity is perhaps our last chance for a truly decentralized stablecoin with minimal governance.
Although Liquity V2 is slowly growing, the TVL currently stands at just $136M. LQTY trades with a market cap below $100M.
In terms of adoption, Liquity has a long way to go, but their ambitions are inspiring. A day will come when crypto will once again need a decentralized stablecoin.
Higher.
Fluid
Look, I know I’m their ambassador but there’s a reason Fluid is the only project I personally work with.
When they stated their ambition to overtake Uniswap in trading volume despite being a lending protocol, I was surprised, but inspired.
And for a day, Fluid flipped Uniswap on Ethereum.
With the recent launch of Fluid DEX Lite, my targets for trading volume, lending TVL, and FLUID price are going to the moon.
What are some projects/tokens that make you dream big?! Share in the comments!
Raise Your Targets
The peak of crypto dreams was the 2017/18 cycle.
Every token had GRAND ambitions: Uber, Airbnb on blockchain, Internet of Things (IOTA), Supply chain management (VeChain), decentralized ad market (Brave), decentralized banks (Bankera), etc.
Yet there were just white papers without technical backing.
2020/21 was different: decentralized finance and self-governance ambitions were backed by smart contracts and real dApps.
Yet DAO governance and real onchain decentralization hasn’t happened: DeFi became Onchain Finance.
This cycle is all about external factors: ETFs, RWAs, and regulation.
Our internal crypto dreams became smaller and price targets smaller as a result despite bullish news over the years.
We’re at the crossroads of mass crypto adoption yet many refuse to dream bigger. All of your price targets are too small.
NVDIA alone is larger than the ENTIRE CRYPTO MARKET CAP. And despite it, NVDA pumped by 604% over a few years.
Crypto is crossing Rubicon with pro-crypto regulation and TradFi adoption.
Dream bigger and raise your targets by many multiples.
Higher. We're just starting.