I think part of the issue is that a lot of the activity and building on XTZ are happening outside of the TF system right now.
@TezTones put on a music event that caught the eye of
@DGBventures but that went wholly unnoticed by the ecosystem as a whole until literally this week. (They've been working on it for over a year.)
Then there's
$POLE - which came out of nowhere and had nothing to do with grants.
Even AB admits there is something off about the Tezos community giving so much attention to the foundation because that is not really the case in most other chains. Most startups go in with the understanding that funding can come from anywhere, but we seem to put an oversized expectations from that one source - which I don't think is healthy as a whole.
For the record, I had a poor experience with the foundation too, which basically put one startup I was a part of out of business last year. But that was always just one path - I picked up the pieces, restarted the project, then moved on from there. In a way, it was a blessing because had we gotten funded (which would not have been enough anyway), they might have interfered with our progress due to conflicts of interests. (My biggest gripe about the process was that I wish they would have been quicker and clearer in its rejection - it's the ambiguity that killed us, not the rejection itself.)
As someone who left the "bigger" chains in favor of
$XTZ, it might be helpful to know that despite their "professional" demeanor, there are some pretty toxic things happening in the background over there too.
- A lot of startups are good at fundraising but stink at execution. They raise millions, which the teams are happy with because they get paid well for a few years (it's important to consider people's motivations here), but then "deliver" some half-assed thing that disappoints everyone. ETH and L2s are full of these half-assed projects that just don't work. (And the gas fees don't help, of course.) They don't care because they got paid anyway and whether it works for the ecosystem as a whole or not, doesn't really matter to them. See ya, suckers!
- NFTs are the only real visible "product" of crypto right now. How is that doing? Very poorly. When was the last time a celeb wanted to associate themselves with NFTs...or even crypto? A lot of that hyped died with FTX/SBF and has turned into a bad word in the entertainment industry right now. The bigger problem is that a lot of NFT projects *actively* pissed off a lot of people in the industry - when OpenSea pulled royalties from their business model that was already the beginning of the end. A big middle finger to all creatives and artists everywhere. π
- People celebrate fundraising success since potential is always fun to talk about, but they don't see the parts where VCs, token holders, speculators, and grant foundations use the money as leverage to "pressure" the teams into making mistakes. Oh, but those money people must be so smart because they have a lot of money, right? Well, we're talking about circles of people who genuinely thought that giving money to SBF was a good idea, and couldn't see past his charade. So imagine those same people calling the shots of what down over the last few years in the industry. Is it any surprise, really?
- In crypto, traffic/views/likes - those sorts of vanity metrics mean nothing because revenue/profitability is what we're looking for in this financial tool, right? Well, about that...old habits die hard and people are still in the Web2 mentality, collecting this type of data even though they have made no in-roads into advertisers, which is the whole point of it. The business model is flawed at the fundamental level and they are throwing a ton of money at things we already know isn't going to work. People get dazzled by the marketing and don't realize that the vast majority of crypto firms are hemorrhaging a lot of money right now for no good reason.
So I chose
#Tezos because out of all of the chains out there, it is the most "blank slate" right now, I'd say. The fact that it's obscure is actually good thing, in an industry where the sentiment runs mostly negative. And because it's decentralized, you won't have people from the top gatekeeping or interfering with your work if they're doing something they don't like. You're free to experiment things on your own, on a financial system that has stayed reasonably stable over the years, both financially and politically.
Everything changes if a Web3 startup emerges that is *actually profitable*, without subsidies from VCs or external life support. Let me know when that happens because I'm always looking. Until then, it's still anyone's game.