TechFlow news — Ari Paul, founder of blockchain investment firm Blocktower Capital, shared his thoughts on the ten crypto sectors recently mentioned by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong. He highlighted the following outlooks for each area:
-
Flatcoin (stablecoins pegged to cost of living) – Ari Paul believes there's still room for development in this space, but entrepreneurs need to bring more advanced "flatcoin" models rather than repeat past ideas.
-
On-chain reputation – Ari Paul thinks on-chain reputation is a dead end for at least the next five years and will cause many losses, similar to the reasons behind the collapse two years ago of uncollateralized and heavily under-collateralized lending protocols and companies.
-
On-chain advertising – Ari Paul sees potential in on-chain advertising, but notes the current market is small, with technical challenges and user experience friction.
-
On-chain capital deployment – Ari Paul agrees this is a natural use case for crypto. While many crypto projects already operate in this space, there’s still much more to build.
-
Work/task markets – Ari Paul believes simply adding crypto payments to platforms like Mechanical Turk isn't meaningfully related to crypto.
-
Layer-2 privacy solutions – Ari Paul says it's difficult for entrepreneurs to monetize privacy-related areas, but emphasizes their immense humanitarian benefits and calls for the development of privacy tools.
-
Fully on-chain P2P exchanges – Ari Paul views this as a core component of cryptocurrency. However, funding in this area is insufficient because the value of privacy is underestimated, preventing the market from fairly rewarding it.
-
On-chain gaming – Ari Paul has been excited about this since 2016. Despite the lack of infrastructure today, he remains enthusiastic.
-
Real-world asset tokenization – Ari Paul says this is one of his and Blocktower’s favorite themes, and something he’s highly optimistic about.
-
"Network state" governance tools – Ari Paul is excited about these tools. While he hasn’t focused on this area as much as Balaji, he believes they can enable 10x improvements in business coordination and can be leveraged even by small nations.
He added that these views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of all Blocktower members or its venture team. He also noted that after posting his thoughts, he realized he shares more common ground with Brian Armstrong than differences.
