Crypto is culturally in a gutter - in 2017 and 2021 there was bright "sky is the limit" optimism about what crypto and DeFi can bring, breakthroughs in open finance, new frontier of art and culture on NFTs, privacy ZK tech, DAOs and governance ushering the cypherpunk and radical market visions - we were unironically expecting to change the world on so many fronts and there was nowhere else more exciting than crypto even with all the grifts and downs
Post 2022 this was mostly shattered as delivery of all of these dreams was very underwhelming, the last remnants of crypto as a counter culture was not privacy and freedom anymore but just edgelord teenage memes with a token, attempts to coopt the AI excitement with agent tokens and on the finance front best we could muster is ETFs, DATs, tokenised dollars and funds that act like tokenised dollars, and banks using chains as infra for their payments
OG Bitcoiners are either selling to Saylor's and Blackrocks bid to ride into the sunset or praying to Saylor and following his every move like his Satoshi reincarnate
While next door we have civilisation scale megaprojects building silicon temples to awaken our new machine gods that will bring utopia (or dystopia - depends who you ask) - hard to compete with that
Maybe, just maybe we will see crypto culture pendulum swinging back, Zcash could be first sign of that if its not just another orchestrated narrative push (it holds quite well in this market so hopefully this time is different)
But in any case, sky is the limit era is gone, now we are in "show me the numbers" era, in many cases numbers don't look so good compared how many more tokens are going to be launched and unlocked and hit the markets
At least we got stuff that can show real, impactful and substantial value capture such as Hyperliquid so there is a way forward for on-chain first businesses
Talking about businesses I expect the business layer to capture most of the value in the growth adoption phase, much easier to make the case for CRCL, HOOD, COIN at these valuations than vast majority of tokens
Rant over
2025 is unironically “worse” because in 2022 bad things were happening but crypto was the center of the action and the star of the show. You could ascribe negative price action to catalysts that you knew we were going to work through.
Now crypto is the forgotten child, with AI and the mag7 starring. Retail is focused on datacenters quantum and rare earth stocks. Crypto is trending down based on no catalysts, just exhaustion and lack of attention and buyers and a long DAT hangover.
Does this mean it’s over? No just the “4 year cycle” and “alt szn” are obsolete concepts. To make money you have to actually deliver value, and that’s a grim prospect to many
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