I want to write about a project that promised the world, and about what remains of it, because I think there is a lesson in the gap.
It was a crypto ecosystem, and I was the designer. This is the moment for such things. Money is pouring into ideas that exist mainly as diagrams, and the diagrams are magnificent.
The scope was genuinely staggering. Not a coin. An entire ecosystem. A trading platform. A debit card, powered by the chain. A suite of mobile applications. A real gold vault, physically holding real gold. Payments in restaurants, in ride-shares, in nightclubs, in telecommunications. All of it at once.
I cared about the work. I gave that thing a coherent visual language across eighty different currencies and a dozen products, and holding that many moving pieces under a single idea is a real problem, one I was glad to spend my time on. A designer's craft does not become worthless just because the venture around it does.
But I was the designer. I was not the treasury, or the engineering, or the regulator, or whatever combination of those eventually decided the story. I made the face of the thing.
And here is what I keep sitting with. Ambition is not a plan. A diagram with eleven boxes on it is not eleven businesses; it is one very fragile promise. Right now, in this industry, the pitch has run well ahead of the building, and I think most of us in the room half-knew it and kept going anyway.
I do not regret the work, and I regret nothing about the craft. But I have learned to ask a new question before I take a project. It is not what are we building. It is what happens when the money stops, and does this thing still make sense on that morning.