on the outside, huge enduring crypto primitives look inevitable. Uniswap: “of course amms would exist.” Curve: “of course stables needed a dedicated pool.” Maker: “of course defi needed a stablecoin.” Pump: “of course there’d be a button to mint and trade memecoins instantly for capital formation and velocity.” but if you rewind to the moment they were born none of them looked inevitable. they looked like toys. toys are good. @izebel_eth has said that people always need to build good toys. toys are what create markets. some e.g. Uniswap happened because Hayden Adams saw a blog post from Vitalik about a constant-product market maker. x * y = k. kind of elegant, kind of like a math toy. nobody thought anyone would really use it, but Hayden just built it anyway. and that little curiosity ended up being the backbone of ethereum liquidity. Curve came from Michael Egorov’s own itch. he wanted to swap pegged assets with almost no slippage. too narrow, people thought, who even needs that....