<story><title>Starting a crypto project</title><url>https://twitter.com/jonsyu/status/1389635626698297344</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Can confirm. I’m friends with a group of very smart distributed systems engineers who were excited to launch an actually useful crypto project that gets talked about here from time to time.&lt;p&gt;As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.&lt;p&gt;Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.&lt;p&gt;Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.&lt;p&gt;Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notJim</author><text>&amp;gt; They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s almost like all interest in cryptocurrency is driven by greed and speculation. I&amp;#x27;ve been learning more about it, and I&amp;#x27;m pretty convinced this is the case. Go into any crypto space, and all people are talking about is yield, price action, how much their tokens have grown etc. I think the only thing I&amp;#x27;ve seen that isn&amp;#x27;t purely about speculation is NFTs, oddly enough, which seem to be basically a fad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Starting a crypto project</title><url>https://twitter.com/jonsyu/status/1389635626698297344</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Can confirm. I’m friends with a group of very smart distributed systems engineers who were excited to launch an actually useful crypto project that gets talked about here from time to time.&lt;p&gt;As much as they’re excited about the technology itself, very few people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens for their project.&lt;p&gt;Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service. They’re buying them to horde so they can resell to other speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges where they get traded back and forth but never come near the blockchain.&lt;p&gt;Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It’s almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.&lt;p&gt;Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future, but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monkeydust</author><text>Perhaps their initial approach was not the right one i.e. was the public token the right method to maximize the value of their actual offering? Maybe they need to rethink given what you have said.&lt;p&gt;I know of a very similar company (might even be the same one) the telegram forum they have setup is just full of people speculating what will &amp;#x2F; might happen ...will it go to the moon... etc.. They have now moderated that out but still main reason people join the group to start with.</text></comment>