I’m increasingly convinced of one thing:
the core of Web3 is not decentralization, but using money to incentivize the right behaviors.
Almost every Web3 product that truly scales is fundamentally X-to-earn—
using financial incentives to motivate and automatically filter behavior, rather than educating users.
Binance Wallet’s breakout growth came from airdrops and incentives, turning token rewards from strong projects into user growth and traffic.
Polymarket’s breakout follows the same logic:
money incentivizes prediction accuracy, oracle honesty, and the participation of insiders and experts.
Noise isn’t banned—it’s priced as expensive.
This creates a stable positive loop:
higher information quality leads to deeper markets; deeper markets lead to better predictions.
When designing new Web3 products, I now focus on one question:
what traditional problems can be elegantly solved through financial incentives?
Get the incentives right, and the ecosystem grows on its own.
Get them wrong, no narrative or product can save it.
From an exposure perspective,
$UMA stands out as a direct way to participate in this incentive-driven information infrastructure, as it secures and governs the oracle layer that makes systems like Polymarket possible.
#Web3 #IncentiveDesign #Polymarket #Crypto $UMA