Fredrik Haga - 10 Years on the Crypto Rollercoaster - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

All right, GM everybody. Uh, I'm Frederick, CEO and co-founder of June, crypto's biggest data platform. We help about a million people monthly understand what's actually going on and on on chain. Uh, so usually I'm on stage talking about onchain data, but today I'm going to do something a little bit different. So, I'm going to tell you my story of 10 years on the crypto roller coaster.

So, let's go back a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. 10 years ago, more or less exactly, I got interested in crypto and basically got into this this crazy world of ours. And so, what I'm going to talk about today is what has what has that been like? what has been like the first person sort of experience, first-person point of view experience on 10 years in crypto and what have I learned through all of these um roller coaster rides, ups and downs that I've been on. So when I first got interested in crypto, I was studying economics way back in 2015 and I stumbled upon Bitcoin and I I got immediately very fascinated by some of these big questions that I even as an economics student felt like I hadn't really thought about.

But when I saw Bitcoin, I really started to think about what is actually money, what is actually trust, what is this sort of commercial layer of society that money represents, how does it actually work, what are like the first principle mechanisms um that underpins all of this and what happens if you try to sort of redesign or rewire it. So it was a very very fascinating sort of weird subculture um time where all of these questions felt very very sort of interesting and then sort of a little bit later Ethereum came along and suddenly you could program money and you had this idea of actually you can like create logic on top of money while it's still sort of global and 24/7 and all these things and and I remember vividly reading this book and reading about the fact that you could pay a function and this really blew my mind that you can like actually send some money to a computer program to have it run some logic for you. Um that felt like a very very novel interesting idea. Um, and it really was and and sort of shortly thereafter in 2017, you basically had the ICO boom. And so a lot of people programmed money to like do fundraising for like crazy projects.

Um, and so it kind of worked, but it was also, you know, kind of short-lived and people raised obscene amounts of money for projects that had nothing really happening. No users, no claim on nothing. These were just really, you know, tokens spun out of thin air raising a bunch of money on like current hype and then, you know, turns out they they actually didn't have any users. So what what happens then? Well, it's a crash.

You know, the Ethereum price went down 95% in 2018. And so me and my co-founder then said, "Hey, great, great time to build in crypto. Let's build a company." Um, and so that's what we did. And uh we started Dune in uh the summer of 2018.

And uh here's a picture from our failed YC um application video. We didn't get in. Um also here's one of the very first Dune charts which was drawn on a piece of paper by me and my co-founder and CTO was utterly ashamed that we would go and try and sell, you know, something that we really hadn't built yet. and we went to these hackathons and I was pitching my heart out showing people you know literally a handdrawn chart. Um, so that those were the humble beginnings back in 2018.

And then for the next couple years, there was like a big hacker energy I would say in the space. There wasn't a lot of capital. there wasn't that much sort of scale of anything but the people that were in the space were like really dedicated and really thought you know after the the ICO bust that this thing is actually going to be something and we can sort of challenge and change the world by building immutable code and smart contracts and whatnot. So it was a quite exciting time. It's like a challenge your energy like you can sort of red do stuff and we can build novel things and a lot of interesting projects came out this these uh in this era like uh compound of a uh unis swap maker a lot of really novel onchain ideas did appear here and I I remember for instance being really mind-blown by unis swap was built by one guy when it first launched it created a bunch of volume we were tracking it on dune And it just really show the power of building things on the blockchain because you literally had one guy building on a 100k grant or something like a global exchange that that's really grew quickly.

So it it was really exciting. And then in 2020 and 2021 in particular, you know, things grew extremely fast and suddenly, you know, everything changed from being this sort of underground niche thing to really going mainstream. It was all over the media. You had these huge events. I remember going to eat Denver after the pandemic and it was such a huge event suddenly.

Uh before the pandemic, it was just like this small weird hacker thing and suddenly there were people everywhere took over the town. It was like massive. Um, and we thought that, okay, now we're going to just like disrupt everything all at once overnight because like the hockey sticks are everywhere. This is happening now. Uh, I also remember seeing for the first time in person someone looking at a Dune dashboard sitting next to us in a cafe and was like mind-blowing that we had actual users in the real world.

Um, but then of course again, you know, max pain occurred. Turns out we didn't disrupt everything overnight. Uh ETH price again was down 80% in six months. Uh you had the biggest player and like one of the biggest players, one of the biggest brands you know that had gone super mainstream turns out to be a fraud. Um and you know the whole industry was was in a really bad spot and obviously the regulatory um situation was was horrible.

all legitimate projects got sort of subpoenaed and you know had regulatory problems. So it was it was really really tough and really you know not fun at all and very different I would say from the previous sort of downfall after the ICO era where the the industry was still sort of niche. And so there was this very tough period where you kind of really had to fight and dig deep to to keep going. And it was very different to be in this position after the big promise where it felt like the industry had overpromised and then hit this big downturn. Um, and that felt very very different than the 2018 era when the the whole thing was kind of still small.

So now we sort of as an industry had problem with so many things that didn't really happen, didn't really play out. Um, and it's quite painful. So, here's um not my co-founder and one of our investors, Nick at USV on a whiteboard trying to figure out what the hell we're even doing, how this whole thing, you know, is going to make sense and whatnot. And and me and my co-founder back to eating some ramen. Um, and what you got here also in this period was this like massive sort of speculation thing around meme coins instead of more innovation.

In my mind, you basically had all these coins, all these things that were explicitly valueless and it was all fun and games. Um, and honestly, I found it pretty depressing. Like, this was not why I got into this space. This was not what I found novel. It did not give me the same energy as seeing like a unis swap go live for the first time or seeing, you know, some of these actual really interesting new ways of solving real problems when everything was just like get rich quick.

The more scammy you are, the less likely you are to have troubles with the the government and whatnot. Um, and and it was really really tough. I would say you really had to fight fight to to keep going and and see the purpose in all of this. Um but then if you go one year forward to today, so this was basically just a year ago what I just talked about and then suddenly things have really changed again. So now suddenly you have, you know, major fintex here's the CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, you know, posting on on um Packer News why blockchains are so exciting.

and he, you know, basically cites all of these ideas that were kind of obvious already in a way back 10 years ago, but now they're actually happening. You know, it's these things are so amazing for payments because they're instant. The fees are lower. It's more reliable. There's efficient conversion between all kinds of longtail assets.

You have access to USD globally and regulations are actually here, you know. So, just an amazing set of things. and and he you know goes on the internet and talks about this this is a $90 billion fintech company and so finally it feels like now it is really happening you know we have all of these amazing technology building blocks is coming together with actual regulations actual productive assets you know I think up until now you could have critiqued crypto for being very like self-referential and not really having productive assets and at the end of the day finance is about financing things and when you're not financing real things, you know, it doesn't matter that much. It's like a self-s serving system. But when you actually take stocks that's going on chain, US dollars, T bills, all of these type of things, you're suddenly, you know, uh get utility from the superpowers of the underlying uh technology that that crypto has to offer.

Um so now we're here. What have I learned 10 years, you know, in on this crazy roller coaster? So first of all, I think it's really really important to think from first principles and think long term. And this is an industry that's so full of narratives, so full of like short-term things happening that you sometimes think, oh, I got to be on this thing, I got to be on that thing. But there are just like countless narratives that come and go and doesn't matter, you know, long term.

So Dows, token curated reg registries. There's like all these kinds of crazy very cool ideas that you could go and raise like a $10 million seed round in a month if you just put it in the slide deck. But right now it doesn't matter and nothing matters if you're not able to actually get and retain users and you know absent airdrops absent narratives like is this still a valuable useful thing and you know I think that the the reasons I got into crypto are still valid even if FTX happened if you reason from first principles it didn't break any of the amazing properties of crypto but narrative-wise it felt horrible so you really got to dig you know deep down into what is the logic here? Why will this make sense? In 5 10 years, is this thing going to matter?

And then now it's actually playing out, but it's going to take a long time. Like I've been in this industry for 10 years and now it feels like it's happening, but it's been a long ride. And I think anyone that gets in and thinks everybody's everything's going to change overnight. Just it's not true. Technology takes time to to get um you know out into the world and get real usage.

Also, it's very important to understand both the bugs and the features of the system you're trying to disrupt. So, I think a lot of people go around assuming that existing systems like the financial system is all bugs top to bottom. But it turns out existing system has some properties that are actually useful. And so when you try to disrupt something, you should spend time trying to understand what are the actual features also. you know you will find the bugs and you will solve the problem in a new way but you should also respect that there are features you know there's bunch of stuff that should actually be respected and brought forward so you know when you think about handling customer funds when you think about um lockups when you you know when in the ICO area people raise hundreds of million millions of dollars and the team could just like off and take all the and like something about investment contracts and lock ops you know had some properties that were features and so I think that's very important to be humble to the fact that you know let's challenge the system let's build new things but also let's appreciate and understand what is working and what we want to retain from the current system and all over I think this industry you know as with startups in general but in particular here the amplitude is just massive in terms of the ups and downs and so you just got to live with that and And one of June's core values for our employees is embrace the roller coaster.

This is a crazy roller coaster and you got to be long-term minded, stick to your principles and really, you know, be ready for insane swings because that's that's really what what it takes and what the reality is. So with that, uh, I just want to say the the data must flow. You can find June on dune.com and have a great token 249. Thank you.