Crypto Founders’ Inexperience: A Hilarious Hurdle to Mass Adoption

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Ah, the sweet 16th birthday of Bitcoin (BTC)! 🎂🎉 It’s been quite a journey since its inception, inspiring a whole industry of cryptocurrencies, exchanges, digital wallets, and trading apps. The year 2024 was a blockbuster for the crypto sector, thanks to the interest from retail and institutional investors. But alas, the emergence of memecoins and “rug pull” scams has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many investors. 😒

Take, for example, the HAWK memecoin, launched in early December 2024, associated with the viral social media personality Hailey Welch. The coin’s value skyrocketed to a $490m market capitalization, only to plummet by around 90% within hours of its launch. A group of investors has since filed a lawsuit against the creators of the memecoin, accusing them of engaging in misleading market practices. 😱

The cost of inexperience

At the heart of the problem lies a pronounced lack of experience from crypto founders in the web3 space. While many founders hold a degree of technical proficiency in blockchain development, they lack the business acumen and commercial savvy needed to launch a successful crypto product and gain real-world enterprise adoption. 🤯

These supplementary skills are a foundational part of building and sustaining a successful business venture. Their absence has resulted in a proliferation of memecoins that are able to raise huge sums of money, occasionally propped up by a high-profile celebrity, but are ultimately unable to deliver on their promises. By not focusing on establishing a strong business foundation, too many of these projects are often doomed to fail. 💸

From innovation to incubation

To address the problem, we need to look outside the industry and shift our focus from innovation to incubation and adoption. Specifically, non-crypto native incubation hubs hire experienced professionals from a range of industries, from software as a service (SaaS) to business development, marketing, and branding. 🚀

Collectively, this knowledge would be used to evaluate, review, and vet cryptocurrency projects for their financial viability. This crucial outsider perspective, where individuals from a wide range of backgrounds evaluate proposals free from the hype that often clouds new product launches in the crypto space, will help put an end to all the fake promises of founders who are merely looking to make a quick buck at the expense of investors. Instead, these hubs would be able to determine which crypto products have genuine potential, restoring trust and security to a sector that has been tarnished by a combination of inexperience and ineptitude. 🔍

Strategy is everything

The crux of the matter is any successful business venture depends on a fusion of not only ideation and innovation but also strategy and execution. That means creating a strategic roadmap that fuses market positioning, growth projections, and approaches for long-term value creation with risk management considerations, particularly when it comes to mitigating possible “rug pull” events associated with cryptocurrency launches. 📈

The integration of non-crypto native expertise through incubation hubs is a powerful way to nurture a more stable and trustworthy crypto ecosystem, marrying both the innovative spirit of the crypto ecosystem with robust tried-and-tested business principles. Only then can the industry move beyond the era of hype-driven fads towards products that provide tangible real-world utility and deliver on the promise inherent to decentralized technologies. 🌐

Roger Majelle is the CCO of TAO-Validator.com. He specialises in business transformation and SaaS software sales management, with over 15 years of experience driving impactful change for leading organizations like Philips, CA and Salesforce. With a unique blend of expertise in transformation strategies and strategic account management, Roger has successfully guided global companies such as Philips, ASML, KLM, Liberty Global, and KPN in maximizing their operational efficiencies and harnessing the power of innovative SaaS solutions.

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2025-02-08 16:13