A blockchain startup that raised $80 million to build a decentralized record-keeping protocol has successfully shipped a product that industry analysts describe as functionally identical to a spreadsheet, a technology that solved the same problem in 1979.
The Innovation
The protocol allows multiple parties to view a shared list of numbers and agree that the numbers are correct. This capability, previously available for free, now requires a wallet, a gas fee, a seed phrase, and approximately nine seconds per entry.
“The difference is trustlessness,” the founder explained. Asked who currently controls the protocol’s admin keys, he said three guys and a multisig, which is also who controlled the 1979 spreadsheet, except they were called “the accounting department” and you could speak to them.
The Pitch That Worked
Investors were reportedly won over by a deck containing a 2×2 matrix in which the company occupied the top right quadrant — a positioning technique we document in our annotated pitch deck, where slide five is the product and the product is a 404.
The total addressable market was calculated at $900 trillion, a figure derived by adding all money, all money that does not yet exist, and a conservative estimate of alien GDP.
Adoption Metrics
The protocol currently has fourteen daily active users, eleven of whom are employees and three of whom are bots owned by employees. The company describes this as “early,” a word whose usage we have tracked extensively in our degen zodiac, where an entire astrological sign is dedicated to people who have been early for six consecutive years.
The Pivot
At press time, the company had announced a pivot to artificial intelligence, adding the letters “AI” to its name and immediately raising a further $200 million. The spreadsheet, now 47 years old, continues to work perfectly, requires no gas fees, and has never once been rugged.
The Demo
At a recent conference, the founder demonstrated the protocol by entering the number 7 into a shared list. The number appeared on screen 42 seconds later, having been confirmed by validators in four countries and costing $1.80 in fees. The audience applauded.
A heckler entered 7 into a spreadsheet on his phone during the applause and shouted the result. He was escorted out for what organizers described as “hostile benchmarking.”
When A Blockchain Genuinely Helps
To be fair — and this publication is occasionally fair — distributed ledgers do solve a real problem: coordination between parties who cannot trust one another and have no shared authority to appeal to. That is a narrow, genuine, valuable use case.
The trouble is that roughly 95% of deployments involve parties who already trust each other, already share a database, and mainly wanted to raise money. For those, 1979 remains undefeated.
Related Reading
More from the AI Labs Coin desk: the Rug Pull Simulator, a pie chart with one slice, the Rug Pull Field Guide. Everything on this site is satire, except the parts that are quietly useful, which are clearly marked and hidden at the bottom of pages like this one.
Generate your own funding-ready whitepaper in eight seconds using our Instant Whitepaper Generator — indistinguishable from the real ones, because it uses the same method.
