Libra: Why We Walked Away from Web3 Hype

The Beginning

September 2022. My job had become boring. Nothing challenged me anymore.

Our startup had been acquired by a corporate giant, and everything slowed to a crawl. Processes. Middle management. More processes. The spark was gone.

So I quit to build my own business.

The Web3 Dream

I was deeply passionate about Web3 technology. The philosophy captivated me. Decentralization. Consensus mechanisms. Cryptography. The elegant solutions to trust and coordination problems.

Libra was born from this genuine love - a P2P payment system built on Polkadot. We wanted to use these powerful technologies to solve real payment problems.

The Web3 Foundation believed in our vision. They gave us a $16k grant to fund development. We had the resources. We had the technology. We were ready to build.

Reality Hits

We joined Polkadot hackathons. One after another, we failed.

Not because our product was bad. But because nobody in Web3 cared about a payment system. They wanted DeFi yield farms. NFT marketplaces. DAOs. Buzzwords. Fancy stuff.

Our practical payment solution? Boring.

The Real Problem

To succeed in Web3, we realized we needed to play a different game:

Network at endless crypto conferences
Pretend to be visionary founders
Sell the dream, not the product

This wasn't us.

The Conversation

I met Anthony at a coffee shop. My best friend. The person who taught me to code. My co-founder, advisor, and voice of reason.

"I feel the same," he said.

We talked for hours. About why we started building products in the first place. About what really mattered to us:

Building products people actually love to use
Creating delightful moments for users
Solving real problems
Staying true to who we are

Not pretending to be businessmen in suits. Not building to flip to VCs. Not compromising our work ethics for hype.

The Decision

We walked away from Libra.

One year of work. $16k in grant money. Countless hours. All gone.

But we gained something more valuable: clarity.

The Lesson

The right product isn't just about market fit or technical excellence. It's about alignment with your core values.

We still love Web3 technology - the cryptography, the consensus algorithms, the elegant distributed systems. But the ecosystem around it demanded we become someone we're not.

If success means playing games that go against your ethics, it's the wrong kind of success.

What Matters

Build products that:

Align with who you are
Solve problems you genuinely care about
Let you work the way you want to work
Make you proud, not just rich

Moving Forward

Libra taught me the difference between loving a technology and fitting into its culture.

Today, I build products differently. I start with values, not valuations. I focus on users, not investors. I build what matters, not what's hot.

The Web3 technology remains fascinating - and maybe one day we'll use it again, on our own terms.

But for now, I'm building products for real people with real problems. No hype culture. No pretending. Just honest work that makes a difference.

That's the lesson Libra taught me: Build products that align with your values, or don't build at all.

Sometimes the best decision is to walk away. Have you ever quit something that looked successful on paper? I'd love to hear your story.