Crypto has now been around over a decade: Bitcoin since 2012, and Ethereum since 2014. After 10 years it is appropriate for a company or project to evaluate the technologies they have built in terms of product-market fit with users. Crypto is no longer a new category with yet-undefined use cases and infinite potential promise. Though crypto may still be at the beginning of its story as an asset class with far further to grow, compared to established asset classes like real estate and gold, or even compared to the total market cap of Apple stock, it’s mature enough to make the claim some use cases have traction while others have been rejected. The factors taken into account when trying to value a project or company are usually product-market fit with users and revenue. For a mature company FDV is a fairly standard multiple of revenue. For a less mature company usage even if it isn’t driving revenue factors in. That’s why evaluating crypto so far for true PMF is essential to understanding the value of what we’ve built so far, and the potential routes toward crypto creating more value in the future.

In this talk, I explain with stats and stories where crypto has PMF today, separate from speculative use cases and financial games speculators play within a closed-loop onchain system. It’s fair to say closed-loop onchain financial games, which are most of DeFi, count as crypto product-market fit. However, these applications only solve problems for users that crypto itself created, so the amount of net user problems solved is 0. I’ll define PMF for this purpose as solving a problem and having traction with users in a way that exists outside of crypto. None of this is to say DeFi or even speculators do not serve a useful market function; they absolutely do. If we’re going to build an alternative financial system, it needs all the same financial tools as the traditional one, and more, that are desirable specifically to crypto users, that are enabled and unlocked only by the capabilities of blockchain. Speculators, too, are useful in terms of taking on risk on behalf of the rest of the market. But in order to have a conversation about PMF, we need to talk about users solving real problems with crypto, and projects that are earning revenue.