Landed back in NYC from Dubai over the weekend, and I have a bit of a different view than most on what the real takeaways are. First, the good: 1/ Adoption of Stablecoins, Tokenization, real world use cases is accelerating in and outside of crypto (s/o @cmoyall and @tarunchitra on the very cool ACRED / Morpho announcement last week and another awesome conversation with @santiagoroel on Inversion) - but seriously, you don't all need stablecoins. Stop it 2/ As an offshoot of #1, lots of excitement about how to innovate in DeFi as capital markets collide between the crypto and traditional worlds (lots of conversation about @ethena_labs and @Securitize w/ Converge, tons of excitement about web 2/tradfi companies coming onto @solana) 3/ A lot of excitement about AI/Crypto but we've finally entered a more rationale, nuanced discussion about what works and what doesn't - the focus on memecoin chatbots has died thankfully died down 4/ Infra conversations are more focused on building specific improvements needed to bring already existing highly performant chains into the hands of many (eg. @doublezero, privacy, abstraction) 5/ Lastly, lots of founders excited about real metrics, revenue, users, etc -> less focus on just narrative But, still a lot of bad: 6/ Primarily just the level of grift continues to accelerate and accelerate quickly -> people have seen this current time platform and reward some of the worst behavior. The snapback against MOVE is nice to see - but it's not enough. And the grift is institutionalizing and coming out of the fringes 7/ Seeing a lot of the excess come back - focus on glamorous parties, throwing around lots of money for flashy parties, etc - similar to 2021 there is a lot of "we've already made it" behavior from people in a "fake it till you make it" mode. Capital allocation is still not efficient 8/ Tribalism seems to only be increasing, not decreasing -> I still strongly believe this industry is too nascent for the level of underhanded competition that we are seeing. Competition is healthy and natural in business, but there is clearly a lot of conversations happening with Regulators and Governments that are net negative for the growth of the space but potentially net positive for individual actors 9/ People are tired and apathetic already at a time when we should feel energized because of the fundamental tailwinds behind the industry. Especially outside of the categories in #1, and it's all related to just how disheartened people have become because of the accelerating levels of grift. We can't win new talent if we can't self police. We need to do better. I'm excited about the opportunity we have as an industry and @token2049 is a great event, but we need to do better to align incentives so we can more easily self police at a time when there are tremendous amounts of positives underpinning the industry