1/ # "Technology fan club" tokens / History lesson / B2B / Opportunity cost

I often talk about these types of tokens but people aren't sure what I'm referring to:

I'm talking about projects like $VET $VXV $NOIA $QNT $AGI

2/ Projects like these don't launch anymore (The ICOs wouldn't work anymore). They are a relic of an older era of crypto.

3/ In 2017 a lot of people realized they could "make it" by just creating a company, a whitepaper, and doing an ICO. They were mostly nothing but BS. Their business plan was simple: "Do an ICO". What the project was didn't matter. They would think up anything as an excuse.

4/ Everything and anything was created as "X on the blockchain", despite absolutely no use-case being present and many of the teams not even having any developers.

It was a field of near total junk or whitepapers. Even the solid projects such as $DOT were years from development.

5/ In 2018 the market then crashed into a bear market as this tower of worthless junk imploded.

Wheras today we refer to 'fundamentals' as usually meaning adoption. In the era of 2017/18/19 it was very different. There was no utility, no defi, no NFTs, gaming. Nothing.

6/ Fundamentals meant finding a company with a token doing something with a 'solid sounding tech' or being a legit company that you could use to shill with or that would be shilled. It was all we did to go on.

7/ This was the fundamentally 'solid' stuff, as opposed to companies which launched tokens doing something that that had very little BELIEVABLE reason to be decentralised or have a token, such as a 'car review website on the blockchain'.

8/ In the bear market years there were little gains to be found and most people just tried to avoid further losses. Most people took refuge in projects these 'tech fanclub projects', the ones which successfully got investors are those you see that still survive to this day.

9/ Unlike most ICOs which were outright cash grab scams, these 'solid' fanclub projects were usually projects which had an idea for a legit business, or were starting right at the point the ICO era began.

10/ They realised that if they altered their business plan/company to include a crypto utility token, they could get the funding for their company from dumb RETAIL investors for free, instead of the usual path which involves giving up equity in the business to investors who

11/ will do due diligence and scrutinize the legitimacy or realism of the plans. For projects like $FET $AGI this is especially the case due to them being research orientated.

12/ VCs would have questions regarding an MVP, profits. Retail crypto investors ask none of this except 'wen binance', 'wen partnership'. It was easy money.

13/ What you see today in these projects are 'surviving fossils' of that era. The successful projects that where unable to convince enough people to buy, build a community and made it through the bear market (mostly due to that community).

14/ When the crypto market returned in May 2020, most people who knew the game dropped these 'fan club tokens' and moved into other alts. Why? Opportunity cost.

These type of tech fan club tokens are usually doing something outside of crypto. Targeting business/enterprise.

15/ With these projects their entire narrative is 'Someday all these businesses will use this technology and the demand for the token will mean price action'.

Whats wrong with this? NO PROJECT HAS EVER ACHIEVED SIGNIFICANT PRICE ACTION WITH THIS.

16/ You will get some communities who think their 'in it for the tech' approach will pay off. They will cite another project who they think has had some success with this approach and claim that one day they will be them too. One example is $QNT (Which I held during the bear).

17/ This project had people who held for years saying how they didn't need shilling and eventually demand for the product from enterprise or some mythical CBDC partnership would make them rich. In the end it went up quite a lot during 2021: $30-$400 before falling back.

18/ Why did it go up? Was it because of demand for the token from enterprise? No. It was because people some people on CT started shilling it. Speculation. The people who cite this as an example of B2B success don't understand that it didn't happen because of demand from business

19/ These are quite rare. The majority of B2B (Business to Business) projects never have this happen because they are too dry, too boring, too slow. The real problem is that things in the world of business/enterprise move slow and often not that transparent.

20/ In 2017/18 these type of things worked. A single tweet about a partnership would send a token pumping.

Times have changed. It isn't 2018/19 anymore where crypto is just whitepapers. Investors want more.

21/ Investors want projects which are doing something in crypto. Why? Because crypto is developing and growing very fast AND its transparent and all this causes PA.

22/ If you are investing in $DOT you can look at the projects bidding for parachains, launching on parachains, you can see whats happening or yourself. If youre investing in $ETH you can see transparently whats happening on chain, growth, adoption.

23/ If youre investing in a DeFi protocol you can see the TVL growth, other people buying. Speculators can see all this stuff. They see it and FOMO at what might happen as this develops further and the speed at which crypto is developing. It causes price action.

24/ With the B2B project all you have is some words from the team "Exciting partnership coming in Q3", then you have to sit and wait and hope its something good. "We've partnered with X global manufacturer". What does this actually mean? Whats the substance?

25/ It could be anything from nothing, to a pilot. Theres nothing youre likely going to be able to see, nothing to drive fomo. You might have to wait 12 months to get an update on what it even was or what became of it.

26/ All of it requires faith and belief in a team who's interest are not the same as yours, and worse its in a software system that likely doesn't need a token and who usually have competitors in enterprise blockchain, without a token and without the baggage of crypto

27/ All the while they string you along, selling team tokens usually under some BS such as 'operational costs'. (Do you really think if they believed the token will be so valuable they'd selling it like they do?)

28/ Whats likely to happen is while everyone else makes money, you will be stuck hodling something in a community that becomes an echochamber, all shilling a fantasy of future demand.

29/ This is why I emphasize investing in projects doing something IN crypto, targeting users or other crypto projects - DeFi/NFT/Gaming/Metaverse. Crypto is rapidly expanding and growing, its mostly transparent, easily shillable and gets FOMO and speculation easy.

30/ Don't waste opportunity investing in projects that are doing something outside of crypto but with a token built in for an excuse. Whether you get gains won't be because businesses began buying it, it'll be because someone started shilling it, and you'll get more elsewhere.

31/ If youre in one of these tokens and its all you've ever known it can be hard to accept some of this. Everything you may know of crypto has been conditioned through the perspective of those echochambers, shilling a dream of enterprise adoption.

31/ I'd recommend reading Section 1. of these threads a few times. Understanding this stuff could be the difference between you coming out of crypto with nothing, or, a lot of money.

https://twitter.com/marwolwarl/status/1478409501371891713?s=20