Crypto rideshare has died…again.
Teleport — a decentralized rideshare startup — promised lower prices for riders, higher earnings for drivers and bountiful rewards for early adopters. The project closed down on Thursday after numerous attempts at making the venture work.
Fellow OGs, I sense your déjà vu. Arcade City and others have tried using incentives based on blockchain technology to try and break Uber’s and Lyft’s grip. The social purchases of each have failed.
As with many DePIN initiatives, the concept of crypto rideshare relies on a functioning labor market and collective belief. Participants can face a steep uphill struggle when they don’t know who to work with, if incentives are stable or if the project will still exist six months from now. In addition, participation in an ecosystem that is real requires work. Yuck.
Usefulness is slowly dying
Unfortunately, many people seem to have forgotten the value of substance which the blockchain community used to place on. A complete lack of social responsibility has turned trust into an asset and utility into something that is only good for suckers. Just take a look at crypto’s history to see where we are today.
Bitcoin offered scarce digital money with transparent ownership — real utility with tangible value. Altcoins then followed. They built first, and assigned value later. Then, came ICOs – where merely ideas took the place of delivering working products – and NFTs – where hype overshadowed any actual use cases.
Innovation was replaced by speculation as identifying problems proved more lucrative than solving them.
There are also memecoins
Memecoins do not pretend to be real world use cases. That’s why they are so popular. The chaos is a way to express economic rebellion. All the way down to how puckishly participants call these people. “devs” Irony is a form of performance.
Utility has a negative effect because it is dependent on belief. Meme-based vehicles are, by contrast, fully autonomous and race towards the exit. These assets are fast, easy to use and make losing fun.
In the meantime, efforts to add utility to memecoins failed. McAfee AI memecoin crashed midway through an AMA as soon as its upcoming suite of products was discussed. JellyJelly, the cryptocurrency created by Venmo’s founder, soared and then crashed 75% when its creator mentioned a roadmap.
The missing link in Reputation
What is the reason for this opposition to tangible effort and value? The optimism and belief are gone. Because we’ve failed to establish sustainable systems of accountability so far, investors are left to play in the darkness. Real builders are no longer distinguishable from swindlers looking to make quick money.
What’s the point? You can just throw $1000 more on Fartcoin, and you’re done.
In retrospect, it is likely that we should have developed Sybil proof reputation systems alongside smart contracts. Blind trust would also be a cornerstone in Web3 architecture. We could have maintained faith in the long-term value of Web3 if we’d had a way to track builders’ reputations and reveal asset distributions on a reputability matrix.
Anonymousness without accountability leads to chaos. Utility will never be profitable until the balance has been restored.
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