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  "title": "The Year Ahead | Pantera",
  "note": "_Disclosure: I’m a limited partner in a Pantera fund._\n\nPantera's annual outlook for the year ahead is a good read. I read [Joey Krug](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeykrug/)'s update with the most detail.\n\nI like his callout of what has worked in 2022. For all that has been written about FTX and various bankruptcies, which is completely valid, not much has been said about the basic, boring DeFi protocols on crypto that didn’t seek crazy leverage and operated incredibly well through an extremely volatile period.\n\n> The second level of why DeFi protocols worked well in 2022 is the more critical, higher-level reason.  Decentralized protocols can’t just say, “trust me, I went to MIT and want to donate everything to charity”. DeFi protocols are more of a “you don’t have to trust us” nature or, as Google put it so well before they dropped it: DeFi protocols “can’t be evil.”  The only option at the protocol layer is to build something that works, something from first principles, in the open, against a pseudonymous playing field of rational economic actors, where your code is public, and anyone can scrutinize and read it.  \n> \n> Nick Szabo put it best: “trusted third-parties are security holes.” 2022 crypto in a nutshell.\n\nTrusted third-parties are a bit antithetical to crypto to begin with. \n\nKrug's look forward hits on two big problems to solve, and I would put his second as the first and the most important.\n\n> The second set of issues — the usability issues of DeFi — is just as crucial as the liquidity part.  While usability has improved a lot over the years, a common retort is, “the web was super hard to use in the early days, usability shouldn’t be a barrier”. Since the early of days of the web however, user expectations for usability have risen orders of magnitude.  People expect things to be easy to use. \n\nI have onboarded over a hundred people to crypto using POAPs for various events. It is getting easier, but it is still ridiculously complicated for even your average person to do this. Unfortunately this usability is a problem that we need serious companies to work on, and those serious companies decide to avoid the space when you have massive fraud like FTX.\n\nOverall I continue to see so much opportunity in the crypto stack because of the potential to increase efficiency and create entirely new classes of solutions.\n\nIn the entire history of computing, we have never seen a way to drive significant efficiency improvement and decided to just pass on it, and keep doing things the hard and expensive way. I don't think we are going to start now.\n",
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