To the builders who still persist in the crypto industry

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Author: Kydo

Translation: Ken, Chaincatcher

Yesterday, a tweet struck a nerve. It revealed a shared yet silent despair — many of us no longer find joy in working here.

If you’re not involved in stablecoins, or if you’re not someone with a high passion for financial markets, chances are you’re not finding much fun in the crypto space right now.

Worse still, you see artificial intelligence developing at an astonishing speed and vitality, while your daily work seems to be stagnating. I know this feeling because I’ve been there myself. That’s why I wrote that tweet.

The fact that so many people resonated with it (I’ve received 60 private messages so far) shows that many of you share the same feelings — just not spoken out loud.

So let me loudly say what everyone’s tacit understanding is.

The era of selling products to crypto developers is over

In the last cycle, selling products to crypto developers was feasible. Data metrics mattered more than revenue. Partnership logos mattered more than revenue. Community vibe mattered more than revenue. You were just an expense on their books, and everyone was happy to spend money.

This paradigm has been dead for about 18 months. We wish we had realized it sooner.

Today, more and more people agree: cryptocurrencies are only suitable for finance. Haseeb from Dragonfly, Kyle from Multicoin, Toly from Solana — they’ve all said this. Most of you probably think so too, even if you don’t openly admit it.

I understand why people reach this conclusion. Most tokens are meme coins. They don’t hold any assets or owe any debts — because what you truly own is only on-chain status, which is highly limited.

That’s why native crypto applications like trading and lending are the only two types that can truly make money on-chain.

But many of us are not working in DeFi. We’re building infrastructure for new use cases beyond DeFi. And here’s an uncomfortable truth: based on our analysis, the overall market potential for this work is roughly $200-300 million annually. And this money is divided among hundreds of teams. The most successful teams earn only a few tens of millions of dollars. After so many years of development and maturity, that’s the ceiling.

If you’re building a venture-capital-worthy company, you’re left with very clear options. If you want to serve crypto developers, the market is small. So, you either suit up and sell your infrastructure to traditional financial institutions, or, like many, shut down and pivot to AI.

Many have left crypto for AI because they understand their strengths. They know their team’s expertise. They also realize that their competitive advantage isn’t in enduring the long, complex B2B sales cycles of traditional finance. That’s why many of you now feel confused.

Crypto and AI dead-end

So you’ve turned your gaze to the only seemingly vibrant field — the intersection of crypto and AI — and tried to find a foothold. But the options are not ideal.

Option 1: Traditional business model + AI + a token. This token has no real utility, just like most other tokens. Basically, you’re developing a regular product and slapping a financialized shell on top. It’s demoralizing because you’ve been playing this game for five years.

Option 2: Decentralized AI infrastructure. Privacy, security, verifiability — this is the missionary route, the old paradigm. But I doubt it suits most of you: few are willing to go through another long “god-building” campaign without immediate feedback and tangible income.

Option 3: Providing stablecoin infrastructure for AI agents. From a business perspective, this is interesting, but the competition is fierce. Circle, Stripe, and all major stablecoin players are fully committed. In this no-man’s land of unclear battlegrounds, fighting them as a startup is discouraging.

The menu and reasons people are leaving

So, the options on the table today are:

• Stay in the crypto religion and work toward a resilient decentralized future.
• Suit up, join the big players, and promote stablecoins.
• Build a “selling shovels” tool company for the stablecoin ecosystem.
• Continue in DeFi: trading, lending, creating financial pipelines for the internet.
• Or develop a niche product that may never become a billion-dollar investment but can generate real profits and satisfy genuine users.

Beyond that, there aren’t many options. That’s why many are likely to leave for AI. Honestly, I completely understand.

This is why crypto is no longer as exciting.

That’s my diagnosis. It’s the result of six months of feeling, analyzing, and refining. If you just want an honest take on “why the crypto space feels stagnant,” you’ve finished reading. You can now close this page, go for a walk, and experience real life.

But I can tell you: I’ve never been more passionate about my current work. The last time I felt this way was probably when I first learned what crypto is and what it can do. And it’s not just my personal feeling — everyone around me shares it. So, if you want a quick summary of what I truly believe, keep reading.

Just remember, from here on, I’m selling my beliefs.

What I find truly interesting

Over the past six months, I’ve been trying to answer: how to find a market big enough, with a clear, product-oriented non-financial solution rooted in crypto, that both insiders and outsiders can use?

This has been my constant focus. Crypto is a superconductor of capital. Capital drives growth. The problem is, we’ve been fueling things that can’t grow — like pouring gasoline on ice, hoping it will burn brighter.

AI makes growth and building useful products easier than ever. Tasks that once required fifty people can now be done by one. The cost of creating real products and companies is collapsing. These products and companies are growing rapidly, with revenue, real users, and real feedback loops. They need fuel to accelerate. And crypto is the best fuel mechanism invented for this purpose.

This is the only interesting question I see now: how to leverage crypto’s superpower — instant, global, programmable capital formation — and direct it toward genuinely growing things? We believe the answer is Agent companies. To do this, we first need to enable tokens to “own” assets, and we’ve been building this capability over the past five years. Now, we’re turning it into a product to realize this vision.

If this resonates with you, if you’re excited about our direction, want to build with us, or explore collaboration, DM me.

If you think friends might resonate with this, please share. In my view, those who are dissatisfied with the status quo are precisely the ones who should be building the future.