Crypto is dead.
I don't mean the price is going to zero, or that blockchains will stop producing blocks, or that stablecoins will quietly disappear. I mean something much more uncomfortable for someone like me, who has spent the last decade deep in this industry.
My career, my network, and a significant part of my identity have revolved around "crypto." I've lived through the ICO boom, DeFi summer, the NFT craze, points metaverse, meme coins... almost all of it.
In Telegram group chats, on Crypto Twitter, at conferences, and on countless founder calls, there was a shared assumption: crypto was the center of the universe, and our job was to make that universe expand.
I now hold almost the opposite view.
"Crypto" as a self-contained world is dying.
The technology is about to dissolve into everything else, and those who mistook the bubbles of the past for the destination will be left behind.
So why am I still bullish on crypto?
Because this "death" is the gateway to something far greater than the industry we've been trying to defend.
The "Bubble World" We Built
In the modern history of the crypto industry, the noisiest sectors have often been built by "crypto natives" for "crypto natives."
Here, "crypto native" doesn't mean all traders, or those seeking a better or different financial system, but a narrower group: those who have already moved their entire financial lives on-chain.
We optimized everything for these users:
- Interfaces assumed users were comfortable moving five or even six-figure sums via browser extensions;
- Educational content was essentially "just read a few more tweets";
- Feature sets revolved around liquidity mining, points, token drops, and meta-games only understandable to those already in the know;
- More importantly, we built a go-to-market (GTM) playbook that mostly worked on ourselves:
- Launch a token with a points program;
- Start liquidity mining;
- Enable referral codes;
- Create a Discord community, hire an intern to run the account, and call it "community."
This is the so-called "crypto for crypto's sake" meta-game: closed-loop incentive mechanisms targeting the cohort of addresses that already know how to farm, rotate, and dump on-chain. When founders talk about "user acquisition," they often mean "competing for the same wallet users other projects are also fighting over."
Underpinning all of this was a silent assumption that fueled many careers: over time, the world would become more like us.
That didn't happen. User numbers grew, but the culture remained niche and self-referential. Most activity is still concentrated in the same patterns: trading on-chain assets, leveraging, chasing short-term incentives.
Our so-called "crypto industry" looks less like a general-purpose technology ecosystem and more like a highly liquid Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game.
It's a fun world, even a great one. But its potential is ultimately limited.
What Do I Mean By "Death"?
When I say "crypto is dead," I don't mean blockchains stop working and everyone goes home. I don't mean tokens vanish or the technology fails utterly.
I mean:
Crypto is disintegrating as a self-contained industry. The lines between crypto and "Fintech," "AI Infra," "Payments," "Marketplaces," and "The Casino" are blurring. A "crypto startup" will cease to be a distinct category; it will just be a normal startup that happens to use a blockchain.
Apps built solely for crypto natives will either die or remain permanently niche. If your total addressable market (TAM) is "people who live on-chain all day," you are building in a dead end. While this niche will always exist and some will profit from it, it is not how blockchain technology changes the world.
The "crypto" label is increasingly becoming a liability. Slapping a "crypto" or "Web3" label on something no longer helps attract users, gain regulatory favor, or win capital. Normal entrepreneurs will integrate blockchain technology into their products but will no longer brand themselves as "crypto companies."
The victory of crypto is not the world becoming crypto-native, but everyone benefiting from it without needing to be crypto-native.
The "death" I'm talking about is the end of crypto as a self-enclosed world that others were expected to enter, learn our language, and adopt our rituals. That expectation is dying.
From "Crypto Native" to "Real World Native"
Technological adoption is often not glamorous. It starts with a few "weirdos" and "true believers." If the technology is real, it eventually dissolves into everything else, and people stop calling it "the technology" and focus on the value and use it enables.
This is precisely the direction I believe we are heading: the sign of success will no longer be "more crypto natives" but "more normal people."
We already see nascent signs:
- A user checking election odds on Polymarket may have no idea they're querying a blockchain;
- A merchant in Lagos or Buenos Aires settling invoices with USDT because it works in seconds;
- A saver in a high-inflation economy holding USDC not because they are "bullish on crypto," but because their local currency is collapsing.
These users integrate crypto into their lives without needing to know what a "rollup" is. The technology makes their lives cheaper, faster, more efficient.
But it's not just "degens" vs. "normies." We've missed a huge middle: the tech-savvy who care about privacy and self-sovereignty, or enjoy direct market participation, but have zero interest in yield farming or points. They want self-custody options but don't want to adopt crypto-native culture. They want better tech tools, not a new identity.
Frankly, we are closer than ever to serving this group. Onboarding and UX have dramatically improved. We have mobile-first experiences, social logins, Apple Pay and card payments, abstracted wallets. Using on-chain tech no longer requires a "master's degree in crypto."
The bottleneck is no longer UX, but intent.
Now that we *can* put this technology in anyone's hands, what do we choose to build? Who do we choose to serve?
Too often, the answer is still:
- "We're solving crypto-native problems for crypto-natives."
- "We're making it easier for people already on-chain to stay on-chain."
- "We're building a better casino for people already spending all day in the casino."
And this part, will be left behind.
We should anticipate crypto following the path of other foundational technologies. No one says "I am an internet user." No one is proud of "using the cloud." People just use products and get things done.
"Crypto user" will sound just as strange in the future.
What's Worth Keeping?
This is not an argument for the total destruction of crypto culture. In fact, parts of crypto-native culture are worth keeping and spreading:
- Permissionless Access: Anyone can connect and build.
- Global Liquidity & 24/7 Markets: A market that never sleeps.
- Composability: Open state and open APIs foster innovation and collaboration.
- User Ownership (selectively): Granting user ownership where it genuinely makes the product better.
There are also "fun weird" parts worth preserving:
- Public Development: Iterating and shipping products in the public eye.
- Open Source Ethos: Driving technological progress and community collaboration.
- Willingness to Experiment Financially: A boldness traditional boards would never approve.
We also need to be realistic: The casino (speculative markets) paid for a lot of infrastructure. The speculative money flows and fee spikes often sneered at funded "boring" infrastructure like payments. The goal isn't to destroy the casino; it's to stop mistaking the casino for the entire city.
Crypto culture gave us real gifts. The task isn't to bury them but to smuggle them into everything else.
Why the Old Playbook is Ending
If you buy the above, you must re-examine the current playbook.
Liquidity mining, points programs, airdrops—these are mostly just recirculating the same capital within the same circle via slightly different UIs. The cycle is: launch, attract farmers, farm more, exit, then complain "users are too mercenary." Day 1 metrics look amazing, but 3-month retention is often abysmal.
From an investor's perspective, you can quickly spot the hype pattern: teams are great at generating attention and designing incentives, but when you ask key questions, they often have little to say:
- Who is this product for, outside the Crypto Twitter (CT) circle?
- Why would they keep using it once rewards stop?
- What's the point for someone who doesn't care about base points or token tickers?
The problem isn't that we *can't* reach normies anymore. Tooling has advanced to let us do that. The problem is we rarely *choose* to build things that matter to normies.
Another place this mindset hits a wall is growth. When you try to break out, you run straight into compliance.
KYC and regulation aren't some top-down imposition; they are being pulled in by marginal entrepreneurs who realize their businesses cannot grow without them.
- Touch real payment network, you *will* touch KYC.
- Want to work with institutional counterparties? You need guardrails.
- Deal with credit, identity, or real-world assets? The idea that "everyone stays anonymous" quickly becomes unworkable.
Parts of the on-chain economy may remain fully anonymous and unregulated. That's a feature. Believing most economic activity will stay there is naive.
The "you'll all become us eventually" mindset is a cop-out, an attempt to avoid the hard work of solving problems, distributing products, and building business models. You can feel the fatigue as the hype fails to translate into lasting user adoption or returns. It's not just macro; it's the ceiling of only building for ourselves.
Crypto as the World's Backend
If the old playbook is dying, what comes next? I think about it in three layers:
1) The Infrastructure Layer: Quiet, Boring, Profound
Blockchains become the default infrastructure for: settlement layers for certain types of payments and markets, stablecoins for cross-border flows, shared state for identity, collateral, ownership records.
Most users never know or care these services are "on-chain." They just experience faster settlement, more reliable access, global by default, and programmable money functions traditional banks can offer.
2) The Product Layer: Not "Crypto Products," Just Products
Apps in fintech, commerce, etc., use on-chain tech only where it genuinely improves the experience, aggressively hiding the complexity. They compete on the same dimensions as everything else: price, speed, UX, trust.
They won't sell "it's on a chain"; they'll sell cheaper, faster, more global, more composable, sometimes fairer.
3) The Speculation Layer: Persists, but is Repositioned
The "casino" doesn't disappear, but it ceases to be the whole story. Meme coins, complex derivatives, pure speculation playgrounds persist. Some remain niche; some blur into mainstream trading and entertainment. They don't need to vanish entirely.
The key shift is that speculation becomes a vertical within a larger ecosystem, not the foundation of the entire "industry."
Ultimately, crypto ceases to be a separate industry and quietly dissolves into the global tech stack—the backend making the world run, not a thing apart from it.
Winners and Losers
As crypto becomes the background layer for everything, incentives shift.
For Builders:
- Losers: Teams building products exclusively for CT and the cohort of on-chain addresses; founders whose primary skill is designing liquidity mining, points, and token distribution mechanisms.
- Winners: Teams starting from real user problems, treating crypto as an implementation detail; founders willing to be "boring" and grind on hard problems in trust, compliance, distribution.
For Investors:
- Losers: Funds whose thesis is "crypto for crypto people" and whose core business model is reflexivity.
- Winners: Investors backing real demand, user retention, and sustainable distribution paths in broad markets (payments, credit, identity, marketplaces, data).
For the Incumbent Industry:
- Losers: Those whose identity is "I was here first, the world should adapt to me"; ecosystems that refuse integration, insisting "pure crypto" is the only right path.
- Winners: Teams building infrastructure and products loved and relied upon by real users; projects that can integrate into existing financial and consumer flows; teams willing to partner when it brings new demand on-chain. Embedding crypto into the real economy is the path to large, lasting success.
This Transition is Hard to Accept
If you've been deep in crypto for years, this transition can be hard to swallow.
It feels like a betrayal of the time, energy, and belief you invested—especially when the industry wasn't yet accepted—to hear "the trench is closing, the battlefield has moved elsewhere" after years in those trenches.
Many built identity on being "early," "different," playing a game outsiders didn't understand. The world may adopt the tools but not the identity, and that feels like a loss.
But this is the normal trajectory of all successful technologies.
The internet "died" as a subculture because it became ubiquitous and boring; the "cloud" ceased being an exciting frontier because every serious company quietly adopted it. Nobody mourns these "deaths" now because they are the price of success.
The maturation of crypto means the "crypto" we knew must die. But this isn't failure; it's the logical outcome of what we supposedly sought.
Crypto Is Dead, Long Live Crypto
If we get this transition right, we stop measuring "crypto adoption" as a goal in itself.
Instead, we talk about:
- The products and businesses that depend on this infrastructure;
- Markets that are more global, open, and programmable than their predecessors;
- People whose lives changed because they got access to tools their local banking system couldn't provide.
You can cling to the insular, self-referential industry we built, hoping the world eventually comes to us; or you can accept that phase is ending and start building and investing for a much wider audience.
Our mission was never to turn everyone into a crypto native. Our mission was to make the world better with the tools we built—even if the world eventually forgets their names.
The Key Question: Who Are You Building For?
If you're a builder or an investor, ask yourself this directly:
Am I solving problems for crypto natives, or am I solving problems for the world?
Your answer will determine your place in this obituary.
