1confirmation has taken another look at consumer crypto after more than a decade of experiments and says several ideas that failed in earlier cycles may now have a better shot. Its central point is simple: companies fail for many reasons, but timing is one of the most common. Many of the companies that eventually win are not the first to try an idea. They arrive after infrastructure improves and user behavior shifts.
That framing leads the firm to a set of five categories it believes are worth revisiting, not because past versions succeeded, but because the conditions around them may have changed.
Internet-native assets
The first category is internet-native assets. During the NFT boom in 2021, Cent built a marketplace that tokenized tweets. On March 22, 2021, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2,915,835.47, or 1,630 ETH.
NBA Top Shot also tried to bring culturally important moments on-chain, but the final product still looked and felt much like a set of digital collectible cards. According to the article, the industry still has not found a strong way to meaningfully capture attention or cultural moments on the internet.
Memecoins may come to mind, but 1confirmation argues they function more as a proxy for attention than as an asset that truly carries the cultural moment itself. While much of the market is now focused on real-world assets, or RWA, such as stocks, US Treasuries, real estate, and collectible cards, the firm points to the opposite direction as a larger opportunity: a new crypto-native asset class that does not exist in the physical world at all.
X-to-Earn
The second theme is X-to-Earn. Projects such as STEPN and Axie Infinity once gained major traction, in part because users did not need to buy crypto first. They were given a way to earn it.
1confirmation says the wrong lesson would be to conclude that earning crypto by doing something is a bad idea in itself. The real lesson, in its view, is that endlessly distributing freely tradable tokens to users is not a sustainable economic model.
The article adds that for most people, the first crypto they ever receive may come not from buying but from earning. The harder question is what they are earning and why they would want to keep holding it.
The metaverse
The metaverse is the third category. 1confirmation acknowledges how poorly the last wave developed and says the term itself now feels awkward to say out loud. Decentraland, The Sandbox, and many similar projects tried to recreate the physical world online, complete with land, buildings, and digital real estate. The piece notes that when Facebook changed its name to Meta, it was still a company with a $900 billion market value.
Today, one of the strongest narratives is to build for IRL. But if everyone is heading toward IRL, the opposite direction may be worth another look: what should the next generation of shared online presence actually feel like?
In 1confirmation’s telling, the core mistake of the metaverse era may not have been the belief that people would spend time in digital worlds. The mistake may have been assuming those worlds had to resemble the real one.
DAOs
On DAOs, the article stops short of calling the model a complete failure because many DAOs still exist today. Even so, it says they have clearly fallen short of the original expectations around them.
ConstitutionDAO stands out to the firm as a more interesting experiment because the objective was much simpler. A group of strangers on the internet raised about $47 million in a matter of days in an attempt to buy an original copy of the US Constitution.
From there, the article sketches a wider set of possibilities: buying a sports team, funding a film, backing an athlete, purchasing a historical artifact, saving a local business, financing scientific research, buying land, or accomplishing something that would be nearly impossible for one person to do alone.
The argument is that DAOs may have become too focused on governance and missed a more basic consumer behavior: people on the internet pooling money to do something together.
People as markets
The fifth category is what the article calls “people as markets.” 1confirmation describes it as the most obvious item on the list because projects tied to the creator economy and SocialFi have already produced a long list of failures, including Friend.tech, Rally, Roll, BitClout, and others.
The common thread behind those products was an effort, in one form or another, to build a market around each individual. Some used creator tokens. Some sold access. Some relied on bonding curves. None of those designs truly held up over time.
Still, the firm does not dismiss the idea outright. People do trade memecoins tied to individuals, make bets around what politicians may do next, buy sports cards based on athlete performance, and to some extent trade a company’s stock based on its founder.
That suggests the concept itself may not be broken. The implementation may be. Traders and fans may want markets built around a person, but the creator may not want to become the product being traded. The article ends with a narrower design question: can a market be built around a person without turning that person into the thing for sale?
An old idea, with better timing
1confirmation closes with a broader claim about where the next breakout consumer crypto app is likely to come from. It probably will not emerge from the themes everyone is chasing today. More likely, it will come from an idea that failed five years ago and is only now meeting the right infrastructure and the right timing.