at its peak, ai agents + defai had 25% of the total mindshare. today it's less than 1% despite the fact that everybody in web2 is now talking about agents. openai released chatgpt agent this week. something I've learned the hard way as a narrative trader this year is the link ppl make between a problem/story and some crypto tokens being presented as its solution only works on the early phase where nobody really understand how things work. we've seen it with depin, decentralized compute, rwa, ai-agents, social-fi, and more recently stablecoins. and every time the mindshare/pa chart looks something like this. the challenge, in terms of investing, is that the problem identified is often real. and, sometimes, in theory, crypto being the solution is not too far fetched. but then you need domain specific knowledge to correctly evaluate the potential of the web3 alternative. real problem I: - compute/gpu too centralized. gpu is the new oil. presented solution: - decentralized gpu from unused consumer hardware. untold truth: - latency is everything. - bad web3 products. too inferior compared to web2. real problem II: - agentic economy is the future. agents would need to make payments autonomously. presented solution: - crypto is the best rail for autonomous payments untold truth: - stripe eats your lunch using crypto rails real problem III: - twitter algo bad. elon bad. accounts suspended. many scammers. you don't own your data. presented solution: - decentralized social media is the future. farcaster, lens untold truth: - not easy to build network effects. distribution is king. sometimes those narratives are correct but it just takes much longer to build web3 products that could compete with existing web2 products. sometimes it's just few founders and VCs coining a new term to create a new "narrative", pushed heavily by kols to make you believe this is the next big thing. maybe the way this happens is that in the early days, left/mid/right curvoors all ape in presence of very incomplete information. ape first, research later is the moto. as time goes by, the right curvoors (funds, vcs) gather more information and might decide to exit their positions if not convinced, which would kill the narrative. I think this is also why it's so common to see in crypto projects launching with zero official information or docs. plus doing so with hype to induce max fomo. even pump did it this month. launching on a weekend. no info about tokenomics. nothing. the most unserious industry ever. but any change to that , a minimum of transparency and accountability, would mean many big players would no longer be able to make money. it's not in their interest so they do their best to keep it that way. this is the reality of the so called decentralized economy.