The times are a changing indeed.
On the heels of friendlier reg framework, and a new class of crypto-natives who were onboarded through Phantom/Pump, it feels like the space is rapidly evolving towards a new metagame.
On one hand, the max degen activity is no longer insane APY defi ponzus that my fellow 2019-2021 trench warriors enjoyed - the "tech" veil has kind of dropped and the hypergambling is advertised as such, whether it's memecoins or high lev perps
On the other hand, its never been a better time to bring a "real" revenue positive business that can benefit from on-chain rails from a composability, transparency, payments settlement etc POV on chain, both from a user onramping and legal perspective
And finally, many of our fav anons from cycles past have been replaced in the defi farms by institutional capital providers looking to deploy majors at scale into robust and modular protocols
In the past, the composition of "value generation" at the ecosystem level probably looked something like
60% defi (half ponzus half real) / 10% "revenue meta" / 30% hypergambling (explicitly stated)
now I think it'll look a bit closer to
30-40% "revenue meta" / 20% DeFi (insto leaning) / 40-50% hypergambling
None of these categories are really mutually exclusive, and many overlap in fact.
Berachain's going to continue to evolve closer to this future - leveraging the chain's primitives, PoL, and a deep builder ecosystem to give the market what it wants.
Today folks got a taste of Real World Animals. The rest of the barn is on the way.
Berachain.