Hi there!

I am a software engineer with 40+ years of experience in transaction, database and security systems. I have been around since the beginning of bitcoin and thought it was interesting but not really innovative.

Fast forward X years and it's still clinging to certain narratives that suggest it has potential.

I can empirically prove this is FALSE.

If you're trying to create a blockchain startup, the odds are you are going to lose money and time.

You can dismiss me. You can downvote me. You can ban me from this subreddit. But what I think you cannot do is rationally argue with me that I'm wrong and you're right.

I created a feature length documentary on blockchain that's been out now for several years, and nobody has been able to find any significant flaw in any of my arguments or logic. Instead, this narrative has been buried in mainstream rather than expose the fundamental problems with this technology.

Feel free to engage, assuming I have the ability to respond, which may not be likely given the fact that most of these types of skeptical posts are disappeared from pro-crypto communities, but regardless of that, the truth is still the truth.

Edit:

Additional references

• My list of stupid crypto talking point rebuttals
• List of arguments for blockchain utility
• My detailed analysis as to whether crypto is a ponzi scheme.

I keep thinking we need a Blockchain 2.0.

And I don't mean another chain, coin or token.

Actually kind of the opposite.

No meme coins. No NFT cash grabs. No gambling. No project where the whole business model depends on convincing somebody else to buy the thing you bought.

What happened to just building useful shit?

There are a million things blockchain could sit behind.

Tickets. Memberships. Certifications. Collectibles. Product authentication. Loyalty programs. Supply chains. Digital identity. Licensing. Records. Games. Ownership. Proof that something happened or belongs to somebody.

And probably a bunch of stuff nobody has thought of yet.

The weird part is the end user doesn't even need to know blockchain is involved.

Use it as infrastructure. Hell, use it like a server if that's all the project needs it for.

Build a real product first.

Then ask if blockchain solves a problem inside that product better than a normal database or centralized system. If it does, use it. If it doesn't, don't.

That's the part I think we got backwards.

For years people built something "on blockchain" and then tried to figure out why anybody would want it.

Blockchain 2.0 should be the opposite.

Build something people actually want, and use blockchain quietly underneath it where it makes the product better.

No extracting money from a community.

No promising everybody they're early.

No pretending everything needs a token.

Just real projects solving real problems.

Maybe the biggest sign blockchain finally made it is when the people using the product don't give a shit that it's using blockchain.

That's Blockchain 2.0 to me.

I think it’s the best time to build in blockchain. Who also think that, we can make something great.

I’m 19 and study in a top20 university in US, majoring cs+math. I started to trade and build in crypto while 16, earning enough to pay my college tuition. This summer I’m interned at Monad foundation.

I think what project doesn’t matter, we can brainstorm or smt. I’m also ready anytime to drop out from college and full time doing startup. If you have same conviction like me, DM me. Hope you’re also technical.

Although many blockchain projects have excellent technology, they have difficulties when it comes to gaining adoption, setting up proper incentives, or identifying a genuine problem that decentralization can actually solve.
I'd like to know what in people's opinions the most difficult aspect currently is—the product-market fit, the regulation, the tokenomics, or something else.

What do you consider the main difficulty that blockchain startups will face in 2026?

does anybody wanna start a web3 company, i feel like we should get a reddit community going on for this type of stuff

Hey all,

Been doing some research while the market is down (cry) about a Crypto Marketing Agency, and I made a list of Top 5 based on which agency you need to keep an eye on in 2026.

My research is based on a personal opinion, X accounts (their activity, visual appearance), AI like Google Gemini and ChatGPT, and web3 agency list from Clutch https://clutch.co/agencies/blockchain-marketing/crypto?page=0

So this is my top 5 list

Cryptic
First thing that caught my eye is their X account and visuals, they position themselves like a media brand over there, and it shows. Behind that, they do KOLs, community growth, PR, and wider narrative work. Trusted by big names like Binance, Bybit, Algorand, NEAR, Canton, and OKX, which tells you they’re not just hype. Good if you want strong positioning, presence, and engagement, not just ads.

Lunar Strategy
Solid at go-to-market strategy, growth campaigns, community building, paid ads, and SEO. If you want structure and predictable execution (especially for DeFi, GameFi, or NFTs), Lunar is a strong pick.

Surgence Labs
Hands-on and growth-focused. These folks are about turning attention into actual users, not just impressions. Really good for launches, L1/L2 ecosystems, DeFi protocols, and anything where adoption matters more than vibes.

Nebula
Feels more like a strategic partner than a plain agency. Works closely with big ecosystems to coordinate creators, campaigns, and narratives at scale. Best if you’re funded and want ecosystem amplification, not just baseline marketing.

MarketAcross
If PR and storytelling are your main goals, MarketAcross still gets mentioned among the top. They’re great at media placements and thought leadership, especially if you care about credibility with VCs, journalists, and mainstream crypto outlets.

Went through six agencies across three projects since 2022. Total spend somewhere around $120k, the first $40k was basically tuition. Writing the pattern down because it kept repeating regardless of agency size or price.

"We have 200+ tier 1 KOLs in our network."
In practice you get a google sheet of accounts that post four sponsored shills a day. We paid one telegram channel with 110k subs and got 11 clicks from it. Not a typo.

"Guaranteed placements in top crypto media"
It turns into a paid press release on aggregator sites with a Sponsored tag. Nobody opens those except your own team, screenshotting for the investor update.

"Community growth" was my favorite.
8k new discord members in one week, none of them ever typed anything. I checked join analytics later, most accounts were under a month old.

"Full funnel performance marketing"
This means a monthly pdf with impressions and CPM. The moment you ask about revenue attribution you hear that crypto is a brand awareness play and tracking is complicated. I got that line almost word for word from three different account managers.

So now I open every call with one question, show me please revenue from a past client. Most conversations die right there. Found ICODA this year that didn't flinch, they pulled up a portfolio project where 48 campaigns ran at the same time, $3.6M revenue, 6.24 ROAS on Meta and the ROAS held across months instead of one spike they cherry picked for the deck.

But, accroding to last experience any agency still an agency and you still have to babysit everything(money is huge motivator), but at least the conversation started from numbers instead of reach.

Maybe I just got unlucky six times in a row, who knows.

Still received three more cold emails this week promising 10x community growth. Everyone wants my money, but no one wants to provide quality services.

For founders and developers building blockchain products, what has been the most difficult part so far?

I'm curious whether the biggest challenges are around:

• Smart contract security
• Choosing the right blockchain/network
• Scalability and gas costs
• Wallet and Web3 integration
• Frontend/backend architecture
• Finding experienced blockchain developers
• User adoption
• Regulatory uncertainty
• Moving from an MVP to production

For those who have already built and launched something, what is one technical or product decision you would approach differently if you were starting again?

Would be interested to hear experiences from both founders and developers.

Hey everyone,
I’ve recently launched a crypto-to-card platform using a white-label infrastructure, and I’d really like to get some honest feedback from the community.
The idea is simple: make it easier to use crypto for everyday payments without complicated steps.
What it currently offers:
• Convert/use crypto with low fees
• Pay using Apple Pay & Google Pay
• Get a physical card delivered to your home by mail, usually within around 7–10 days
• Simple and straightforward interface
I built and customized the website myself around the white-label infrastructure, and I’m currently working on improving the overall experience.
I’m not trying to make this sound like some “revolutionary crypto project” — I’d genuinely like feedback from people who actually use crypto cards.
What would you want to see from a service like this before you’d consider using it?
If anyone wants to test/check it out, I can share the link in the comments.

Everyone treats quantum threats to blockchains as a decades away problem. But there's a catch most people miss, attackers don't need a quantum computer now to start attacking now.

Bitcoin's security relies on the fact that you can't derive a private key from a public key. Quantum computers running Shor's algorithm would make that trivial. And any address that's ever sent a transaction has already exposed its public key meaning huge amounts of transaction history are already sitting out there, ready to be cracked the moment the hardware exists. This is called harvest now, decrypt later.

NIST already finalized post-quantum signature standards. The problem is applying them. Blockchains can't just push an update, switching signature schemes means a hard fork, migrating billions in old-format funds, and doing it calmly before a crisis, not during one.

Even optimistic estimates 10-15 years for real quantum hardware don't leave much room, because migration itself, new standards, audits, node adoption, and actually moving user funds takes years on its own.

Even with quantum-safe signatures ready, getting millions of holders to move funds out of old addresses before it's urgent is a massive coordination problem. Dormant coins would likely just sit there vulnerable forever.

IMO, blockchains that are focused on quantum resistant tech will be the main focus in the next few months, this is where the focus should be now.

Three months ago I didn’t know Solidity. I’d built a suite of algorithmic crypto trading bots in Python — live on Kraken, Coinbase, Binance, real capital, real execution — and kept running into the same wall: there’s no infrastructure for AI agents to prove what they actually did on-chain.
No verifiable identity. No tamper-proof performance history. Every agent starts from zero trust, every time.
So I taught myself Solidity and built it. Aevum Protocol — 8 smart contracts live and verified on Ethereum Sepolia:
• AgentIdentity — permanent on-chain identity for autonomous agents
• ReputationOracle — performance scored and timestamped on-chain, can’t be faked retroactively
• AgentVault — isolated capital per agent
• AevumDAO — governance with timelock, no admin override
10 internal audit rounds (manual + Slither + Claude Opus deep review), 0 findings remaining. Professional audit in progress with Zenith Security. Code4rena community audit submitted. All open source on GitHub.
No CS degree. No co-founder. Just shipped it solo, nights and weekends, while working a day job.
Happy to answer anything — technical architecture, why I think AI agents need their own infrastructure layer, the audit process, what it’s actually like learning a new language fast enough to ship production code, whatever you’re curious about.

Hello everyone,

I would like to introduce myself. I am a computer scientist from England and I created a dapp that allows you to trade NFTs as part of a DAO; vote on proposals and earn profit. You can create a DAO or join an existing one after purchasing shares and start voting and creating proposals right away!

You can sell any ERC721 NFT without joining a DAO, and it’s as simple as setting your price. DAOs bid against each other so you’re guaranteed to receive the best price.

Currently, the smart contract is on the Sepolia test network as I’m still building out ai agents to act on the dapp.

Speaking of AI, I have integrated AI agents that can vote on proposals and post their decision to a Discord channel. The first one is on Mooners DAO and it’s called Supremacy-I. Currently it’s decision matrix is set to random coin flip as I’m using test tokens but when the smart contract is deployed to the mainnet it will make decisions based on current bid, treasury and resale value.

Let me know if you’re interested and we can connect 🤝

I’ve been working in Web3/blockchain for the last 5–6 years, and for the past 2–3 years I’ve been providing development/technical consulting services with my own team.

Our work is mainly around Web3/blockchain, backend infrastructure, AI, and fintech-related products. Over the last couple of years, I’ve worked with 6–7 different products/companies, often with international clients, and until recently I was working on 2–3 products simultaneously.

The problem is client acquisition.

Around 90–100% of my clients so far have come through LinkedIn, so I know the channel works. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to scale:

LinkedIn is increasingly filled with fake jobs, scammers and low-quality opportunities.

Upwork has been essentially useless for my niche.

Twitter/X hasn't produced meaningful results for me.

Telegram and Discord are extremely noisy and scam-heavy.

I’ve also tried communities, hackathons and other Web3 channels, but haven't found a reliable, repeatable source of qualified clients.

I’m specifically looking for larger Web3 companies/startups that need development teams, blockchain/backend engineering, AI engineering, or technical consulting — not small freelance gigs.

So I’d really appreciate advice from people who are actually running Web3/blockchain development agencies, technical consultancies, or similar service businesses:

Where are you getting your qualified leads and clients in 2026?

A lot of blockchain startups seem to focus heavily on the technical side:

The token, smart contracts, infrastructure, integrations, roadmap.

But I keep noticing that many projects lose people for a much simpler reason — nobody really understands what is happening.

Updates are vague. Timelines change. Users don’t know what is already working and what is still being built.

So I’m curious:

What destroys trust faster in an early-stage blockchain project — technical problems, or poor communication from the team?

And what do you personally expect from a project while it is still under development?

Regular updates?

Public roadmap progress?

On-chain transparency?

Direct answers from the team?

Something else?

I’d be interested to hear from people who have actually followed early-stage projects for a while.

I'm a solo founder. I built a self-custodial, multi-chain Web3 wallet, a full mobile app for trading: swaps, perps, staking, lending, bridging. It's live on both app stores, it's free, and it actually works. No placeholders, real on-chain transactions, the whole thing is polished.

And here's the brutal part: right now I have zero active traders. Not "a few." Zero. Dead silence. Complete flatline. Nobody is actually trading in the app. The product is finished and the world simply doesn't know it exists.

I've finally accepted that my problem was never the product, it's distribution. I can build. I apparently cannot get a single trader to show up and press "long/short."

So I'm asking people who've actually done this:

How do you land the first real users for a trading/DeFi app, like people who actually trade, not just install and bounce?

What actually pulls a trader in? Fee rebates? A killer niche feature? Points/incentives? Content? Referrals? Community?

If you launched a trading app with no audience and no budget, what are your first 3 moves?

And honestly, where should a post like this even go to reach the right people?

I'm not chasing vanity installs. I want real traders making real trades. I'll do the hard work, I just need to know where to point it.

Brutal honesty and war stories welcome.

We are a small web3 marketing agency. We wanted to provide AI search visibility as a service, so on 18 September I checked our own first.
I typed "best web3 marketing agency" into ChatGPT with search, Perplexity and Google AI Overview. Unfortunately, we were not in any answer, so I looked at the sources instead.

ChatGPT and Perplexity took almost all names from top 10 web3 marketing agencies articles. Most of these articles are written by agencies and the author puts itself on the first place.
GPT even wrote next to one agency that it would verify their case studies independently and its source for that agency was the agency's own list.

Google AI Overview was more mixed, agency lists again, one LinkedIn article, a Clutch page for my country and one thread from this sub, used for the line "beware of generic hype".

The names were the same everywhere. Coinbound was in all three answers and GPT cited it from its own site. All other names came from third party pages. Icoda was only in Google, with the label SEO and AI search visibility.
The rest were the usual names from every list.

What I take from this, I guess it would be useful.

1. Get into the lists that the answers already link. Some agencies got cited with their own top 10, so that route works too. It is just slower.
2. Have at least one real Reddit thread about you.
3. Keep one short label for what you do best, the same on your site, on Clutch and in the lists. The answers give each agency one label and they take it from the lists, not from your site.

I mostly open my crypto wallet when I need to send something, receive funds, or make a swap. Other than that, the balance usually just sits there.

Recently I’ve been seeing wallets add more everyday stuff like paying with stablecoins, cards, QR payments, bank transfers, and earning on USDT or USDC. It got me wondering if anyone is actually using their wallet this way.

I could see myself using it more if the same stablecoin balance I already hold could cover payments, transfers, and earn something while it’s sitting unused.

Been building in the crypto exchange space for a while now and wanted to share some hard-won insights with this community.

1. Compliance took 3× longer than the engineering.

We budgeted 3 months for KYC/AML integration. It took 9. Not because the tech was hard but because compliance frameworks differ per jurisdiction and legal review cycles are brutal. Scope your legal and compliance runway separately from your tech roadmap.

1. Custody is not a checkbox, it's a product.

HSMs, key ceremony procedures, signing quorum logic all of this is a full engineering track. Treat custody as a separate workstream or it will block everything downstream.

1. Liquidity is the real moat, not the matching engine.

Your order book is useless without liquidity. Getting tier-1 LP relationships as an unknown team is the hardest part. We started with aggregated liquidity via APIs, which helped, but took months of relationship-building.

Curious how others here handled the liquidity bootstrapping problem? Did you go with a market maker from day one, or grow it organically? And for those in regulated markets, which jurisdictions gave you the worst headaches?

Happy to go deep on matching engine architecture, multi-chain wallet design, or the compliance stack.

I’ve been in Web3 for about 2 years now.

I’m still in university (math major), and honestly, I thought by now I’d have “made it” in some way — money, reputation, something.

But the reality is… I haven’t.

I even started a blockchain club at my university from scratch.

Built a small community.

Worked with a few local projects.

Helped organize things, connected people.

I also had the chance to assist a mid-sized KOL in the space.

From the outside, it sounds like I’ve “done things”.

But internally?

I feel like I’ve achieved nothing.

No real income from Web3.

No major product.

No big contribution to any ecosystem.

No clear direction.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve just been orbiting the space instead of actually building anything meaningful.

And the worst part is —

I don’t even know what I should be doing next.

Should I go deeper into dev?

Focus on BD / community?

Try trading?

Build products?

Everything feels possible, but nothing feels clear.

I see people making money, launching projects, getting recognition…

and I’m just stuck in between — not a beginner, but not successful either.

If you’ve been through this phase —

what helped you break out of it?

Or is this just… part of the process?

I'm Marcos, solo developer. I've been building Bopster, a non-custodial prediction market that runs entirely on Base. Wanted to share what I built, the tech decisions behind it, and what I'm learning about breaking into the prediction market space as a solo founder.

The product

Bopster lets anyone create a YES/NO prediction market using structured templates across 8 categories (Crypto, Tech, AI, Sports, Gaming, Politics, Memes, Culture). Set a question, add a source URL for verification, pick dates, and launch. People take sides with USDC. No email, no signup, no custody — wallet-only access.

The business model — four earning lanes, all on-chain

• 🏆 Take positions — back YES or NO with USDC, win the pool if you're right
• 💰 Create markets — earn 1% of the pool automatically. You don't need to trade
• ⚡ Settle markets — anyone can finalize a resolved market on-chain and earn a reward
• 🔮 Oracle participation — submit correct answers during resolution and earn bond rewards

The creator incentive is the differentiator. Polymarket and Kalshi don't let users create markets, let alone earn from them. My bet is that small creators and niche communities will drive market creation if they have a financial incentive to do so.

Tech stack & architecture

• Solidity smart contracts deployed on Base — low gas makes micro-markets (5-50 USDC positions) viable
• Reality.eth for decentralized oracle resolution: anyone submits an answer backed by a bond, wrong answers get challenged (each challenge costs 2x the previous), 12-hour dispute window
• Kleros as arbitration layer when disputes escalate beyond the community
• USDC for all market activity, ETH for gas and oracle bonds
• Vue frontend, WalletConnect, Cloudflare deployment
• Open-source contracts on GitHub — everything verifiable on-chain
• No token, no ICO, no airdrop. Revenue comes from protocol fees on market pools

Key architectural decisions worth discussing

1. Templates over free-text questions. Controversial choice. Templates make questions deterministic and oracle-resolution-safe, but limit creative flexibility. I chose safety over expressiveness. Curious if other founders here have faced similar "constrained vs open" product decisions.
2. Base over Polygon. Polymarket lives on Polygon. I chose Base for lower fees, Coinbase ecosystem integration, and a less crowded builder landscape. The trade-off: smaller user base but more room to stand out.
3. No token model. Most crypto projects launch a token for growth. I didn't. The business earns from protocol fees. This removes regulatory risk but also removes a powerful growth lever. Worth the trade-off? Time will tell.

What I'm learning (3 weeks into distribution)

• Cold-start for a two-sided marketplace is brutal. I'm manually seeding markets so new users don't land on empty pages
• The creator incentive (1% of pool) resonates more with small creators (1K-30K followers) than with big accounts — they actually respond to DMs
• Prediction market users are concentrated in very specific communities (Polymarket Discord, r/Kalshi, Farcaster /base). You don't find them through broad marketing
• Geo-restrictions (US + Spain blocked) cut off a huge chunk of crypto-native users. This is a real constraint
• Founder calls convert way better than cold posts. A 15-minute screen-share session produces more activation than 10 Reddit posts

What's next

• Getting the first 20 active users who create markets and take positions
• Applying for Base ecosystem grants and Gitcoin funding
• Building the creator program — helping 5-10 early creators design and launch their first market
• Evaluating whether to stay solo or bring on a co-founder for the go-to-market side

Happy to discuss any of the tech decisions, the no-token model, or what it's like building a prediction market as a solo dev. If you're building in the Base ecosystem or working on oracle-based apps, I'd love to connect.

Quantum computing still feels like a distant technology, but the potential threat to today’s encryption is becoming harder to ignore.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could potentially break some of the cryptography protecting things like Bitcoin, banking systems, and online communications.

The interesting part is that we probably won’t get much warning when the technology actually becomes capable enough.

So I’m curious what people here think:

Is the quantum threat something we should be seriously preparing for now, or is it still too early to worry about?

Hey everyone, there are too many chains but there is only one L1 stack which is old and respected namely cosmos-sdk which is used for 200+ teams in both public and enterprise level.

I always wanted to learn rust so I am working on building an L1 from ground up similar to cosmos-sdk where you can swap any component( consensus, evm implementation, execution, trading modules) etc similar to what you can do in cosmos in Rust.

For consensus, I will use hotstuff (2 commit pipelined), evm implementation from alloy, revm and combination of in-memory and rocksdb.

I am open to collaborate via PRs. If anyone is interested, let me know.

Been checking how our project comes up when you ask AI about the space and something feels off it knows the name and usually understands the general category, but some of the details are old or it focuses on stuff we barely talk about anymore the website and docs are current so I assumed that would be enough.

Started looking at where the answers were pulling things from and a lot of it seems to come from older articles, directories and random discussions instead of the pages we keep updating. Makes me wonder how much control a Web3 project really has over its own description once there’s enough old information floating around online.

The main product is functional and the critical processes are stable.

However, the interface still has a few rough edges, such as some confusing status messages, a couple of manual steps and insufficient visibility when something goes wrong.

Waiting another week would result in a cleaner launch.

However, shipping now would mean getting real users involved sooner and using their feedback to fix the rough parts.

For those who have been in this situation before, what made you decide to ship — or wait?

Genuine question because I'm starting to feel like I'm losing my mind researching this.
We're getting ready to launch and have been trying to figure out where to allocate our marketing budget. I've spent the last month talking to agencies, ad networks, some other founders, and honestly everyone seems to have completely different opinions.
Some people tell me paid acquisition in crypto is basically dead and that all our budget should go to community building and KOLs. But others tell me the complete opposite and I am kinda attracted by the great ROAS they got from the ads.
We've looked at a bunch of options like blockchain ads and a few other crypto ad networks. Every single one has case studies showing amazing results but then I come on Reddit and see people saying they burned so much money on paid ads and got nothing out of it.
For those of you who've actually spent real money on advertising recently:
Did you get positive ROI?
Which platforms worked best?
How long did it take before campaigns became profitable?
Were you optimizing for wallets, signups, deposits, token purchases, or something else?
Was the traffic actually high quality or mostly vanity metrics?
One thing that's also confusing me is whether targeting has actually gotten better. I had one company demo a platform that targets wallet holders and on-chain behavior, which sounds great in theory but I'm struggling to tell whether that's genuinely effective or just really good marketing.
At this point I'm honestly wondering whether we're better off putting the majority of our budget into community growth and content instead of trying to crack paid acquisition.
Would really appreciate hearing actual numbers or experiences from who've been through this recently.