Crypto crashed. Good websites didn't.

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday. Terra went to zero in May. Bitcoin is a quarter of what it was a year ago, and the NFT collections that brands rushed out last winter are, mostly, worth the gas fee it took to mint them. We are not going to pretend we predicted the details. We did say the same thing twice, in 2017 and 2021: build the thing people use, put the price on it, make it fast. It turns out that advice is boring in a boom and correct afterwards.

What actually went wrong

Not the technology. Exchanges that behaved like banks without the rules banks have. Tokens whose only product was the token. Brands that treated a speculative asset as a marketing channel. Websites with a countdown timer where the product should be. All of it looked like money for a while, and none of it had a customer who was not also a speculator.

What the boom leaves behind

Some genuinely useful things, quietly:

• Wallet login as an alternative to passwords is a good idea whether or not a coin is involved.
• Tickets and memberships that cannot be forged and can be resold with the organiser taking a cut. Real problem, real solution, will outlive the hype.
• A generation of developers who learned to build under real security pressure. Some of them will build the next useful thing.
• A lesson about trust that every business should take: the exchanges that survived are the ones that could show what they held. Transparency is a feature.

What it means for your website, honestly

Nothing changed. People still search for what they need, still judge you in five seconds, still leave if the page takes four, still call when the page answers their question. The businesses that spent 2021 building a token spent a year not doing that. The ones that spent it fixing their ordering page, their Google listing and their reviews are fine this week.

If your site still has a "Web3" section, take it down this afternoon. Nobody will miss it, and the visitor who came for the opening hours will find them faster.

We will keep the two old posts up. They are more useful with this one under them.