Tricky_Shark/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Crypto rideshare has died…again.
Teleport — a decentralized rideshare startup — promised lower prices for riders, higher earnings for drivers and bountiful rewards for early adopters. But on Thursday, the project shut down, run aground trying to make the business work.
Fellow OGs, I sense your déjà vu. Arcade City, La’Zooz, Chasyr, Ridecoin and more have all attempted to break Uber and Lyft’s stranglehold using blockchain-based incentives. Somehow, each has failed to gain social purchase.
Like a lot of DePIN projects, the crypto rideshare concept depends on collective belief and a functional labor market. Projects face an uphill battle when participants can’t be sure who they’re working with, whether incentives will remain stable or whether the system itself will exist in six months. Plus, engagement in an actual ecosystem requires real work and participation. Yuck.
The slow death of usefulness
Sadly, it seems a lot of folks have lost the love of substance that the blockchain community once prized. An utter lack of social accountability has long transformed trust into a liability and utility into a sucker’s bet. It only takes a glance at crypto’s timeline to see how we got here.
Bitcoin offered scarce digital money with transparent ownership — real utility with tangible value. Altcoins followed, building first and assigning value second. Then came ICOs, where mere ideas replaced the need to actually deliver working products, and NFTs, where hype fully eclipsed the promise of any actionable use case whatsoever (beyond feigned social hierarchy).
Identifying problems became more profitable than solving them, and the space shifted from innovation to speculation.
And then there were memecoins
Memecoins don’t pretend to have real-world use cases, and that’s the point. They embrace chaos as a form of economic rebellion. Everything down to the puckishness with which participants insist upon calling the people behind these assets “devs” is an act of performative irony.
Utility is a liability because it requires belief over time. Meme-based assets, on the other hand, are fully self-aware vehicles, operating in a no-holds-barred race to the exit. They’re fast, they’re easy and they make losing fun.
Meanwhile, attempts to sneak utility into memecoins have flopped. McAfee’s AI memecoin tanked mid-AMA the moment its upcoming product suite was mentioned. The Venmo founder’s JellyJelly soared, then cratered 75% the instant its creator hinted at a roadmap.
Reputation as the missing piece
So why are promises of tangible value and effort so anathema to the current movement? Well, the optimism of belief is gone. We have so far failed to create sustainable methods of accountability, leaving investors to gamble in the dark. As a result, real builders have become indistinguishable from grifters looking for a quick cash grab.
So why even bother? Just throw another $1000 on Fartcoin and call it a day.
Looking back, we probably should have built Sybil-proof reputation systems in tandem with smart contracts and made blind trust a fundamental cornerstone of Web3 architecture. If we had methods to trace builders’ reputations, reveal asset distributions across a reputability mesh, and flag early mass exits based on transparent behavioral data, we might have preserved faith in long-term utility instead of fueling an endless cycle of speculation.
Anonymity without accountability breeds chaos. And until that balance is restored, utility will always be a losing bet.
Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.
Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.
The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.
