Crypto Is Dead—And That’s How It Wins

Crypto is dead.

I don’t mean prices go to zero. I don’t mean chains stop producing blocks or stablecoins quietly vanish. I mean something very uncomfortable for people like me who’ve spent the better part of the last decade living inside this industry.

I’ve built my career, my network, and a lot of my identity around “crypto.” I lived through the ICO boom, DeFi summer, NFT mania, the points meta, memecoins… pretty much all of it. In Telegram chats, on CT, at conferences, and in many founder calls where the starting assumption was the same: crypto is the center of the universe, the job is to make the universe bigger.

What I believe now is almost the opposite.

“Crypto” as a self-contained world is dying.

The technology is about to dissolve into everything else, and the people who mistake the old bubble for the end state are going to get left behind.

So why am I still bullish?

Because that death is the gateway to something bigger than the industry we’ve been defending.

The bubble we built

For most of its modern life, the loudest corner of crypto has been built by crypto natives, for crypto natives.

Not anyone who trades. Not anyone who wants a better or different version of finance. A much narrower group: people whose financial life is already on-chain.

We optimized everything around that user:

Interfaces that assume you’re comfortable moving five or six figures through a browser extension

Education that’s basically “read more threads”

Feature sets built around farms, points, emissions, and metagames that only make sense if you're already here

Most importantly, we built a GTM playbook that mostly works on ourselves:

Drop a token with a points program

Spin up liquidity mining

Turn on referral codes

Spin up a Discord, hire an intern account, call it “community”

This is the crypto-for-crypto meta: closed-loop incentives aimed at the same cluster of addresses that already know how to farm, rotate, and dump. When founders say “user acquisition,” what they often mean is “recycling the same wallets everyone else is fighting over.”

Underneath it is a quiet assumption that has carried a lot of careers: over time, the world will just become more like us.

That hasn’t happened. User numbers grew, but the culture stayed niche and self-referential. Most activity still clusters around the same behaviors: trading on-chain assets, levering up, farming short-term incentives, etc.

What we’ve been calling “the crypto industry” looks less like a general-purpose technology ecosystem and more like a very liquid MMO.

Fun world. Great world, honestly. But it’s fundamentally capped.

What I mean by “dead”

So when I say “crypto is dead,” I’m not saying chains turn off and everyone goes home. I’m not saying tokens disappear or the tech failed.

I’m saying this:

Crypto as a self-contained industry dissolves. The sharp line between “crypto” and “fintech,” “AI infra,” “payments,” “markets,” and “casino” blurs. “Crypto startup” stops being a real category. It’s just a startup that happens to use a blockchain.

Most crypto-native-only apps die or stay permanently small. If your TAM is “people who already spend all day on-chain,” you’re building in a cul-de-sac. There will always be a niche there, and some people will do well, but it’s not how this tech changes the world.

The label becomes baggage. Calling something “crypto” or “Web3” stops helping with users, regulators, or capital. Ordinary founders integrate the rails without adopting the identity.

Crypto doesn’t win by turning the world into crypto natives. It wins when nobody has to be crypto-native to benefit from it.

The death I’m talking about is the death of crypto as a self-conscious, separate world that expects everyone else to walk into our universe, learn our language, and adopt our rituals.

From crypto-native to real-world-native

Technology adoption usually looks boring. Early on, you get the weirdos and true believers. If the tech is real, it disappears into everything else. People stop talking about it as “technology” and start talking about what they can do.

That’s where I think we’re heading: the success condition is not “more crypto natives,” it’s “more normal people.”

We’re already seeing the green shoots: Polymarket users checking election odds who don’t realize they’re querying a blockchain; merchants in Lagos or Buenos Aires settling invoices in USDT because it clears in seconds; savers in a high-inflation economy holding USDC not because they’re “long crypto,” but because their local currency is failing.

These users fit crypto into their lives without needing to know what a rollup is. The tech makes their lives cheaper, faster, and better.

It’s not as simple as “degens” vs “normies"  though. There’s a massive middle class we’ve mostly ignored: people who are tech-savvy, care about privacy and control, and or like direct exposure to markets, but have zero interest in yield or points farming. They want things like self-custody without adopting crypto-native culture. They want better rails, not a new personality.

And to be fair, we’re closer to serving them than we’ve ever been. Onboarding and UX are dramatically better, we have things like mobile-first experiences, social logins, Apple Pay and cards, abstracted wallets. You no longer need a master’s degree in crypto to use on-chain rails.

That’s exactly why the bottleneck is no longer UX. It’s intent.

Given that we can put this in anyone’s hands, what are we choosing to build? Who are we choosing to serve?

Too often, the answers are still:

“We’re solving crypto-native problems for crypto-native people.”

“We’re making it easier to be on-chain if you’re already on-chain.”

“We’re building better casinos for a user base that already spends all day at the tables.”

That’s the part that’s going to get left behind.

We should expect crypto to follow the same path other foundational tech has. Nobody says “I’m an internet user.” Nobody brags about “using cloud.” You use products. You do things.

“Crypto user” will sound just as odd.

What deserves to survive

None of this is an argument for burning the culture down. There are parts of crypto-native culture that should survive and spread:

Permissionless access: anyone can plug in and build

Global liquidity & 24/7 markets: markets that never sleep

Composability: open state and open APIs

User ownership (selectively): where it actually makes products better

And there’s also a “good weirdness” worth keeping:

Shipping in public

Open-source instincts

A willingness to try financial experiments a normal board would never approve

And we should be honest: the casino pays for a lot of the construction. The speculative flows and fee spikes everyone loves to sneer at funded the infrastructure that powers boring things like payments. The goal isn’t to kill the casino. It’s to stop mistaking the casino for the whole city.

Crypto culture gave us real gifts. The point isn’t to bury those. The point is to smuggle them into everything else.

Why the old playbook is running out of road

If you believe any of this, you have to look at the current playbook differently.

Liquidity mining, points, and airdrops mostly move the same capital around between slightly different UIs. The loop is: launch, farm, farm more, exit, complain about “mercenary users.” Day-one metrics look incredible.

Month-three retention is often a disaster.

From an investor’s seat, you learn to recognize the shape of the hype: teams that are world-class at spinning up attention and incentives, but have almost nothing to say when you ask:

Who is this for beyond CT?

Why would they use it once rewards stop?

How does this matter to anyone who doesn’t think in basis points and token symbols?

The problem isn’t that we can’t reach normal people anymore. The tooling is finally good enough that we can. The problem is that we rarely bother to build anything that would make sense to them.

The other place this mindset runs into a wall is growth. The moment you try to go outside the bubble, you often crash into compliance.

KYC and regulation don’t arrive as some neat top-down moment. They get pulled in from the edges by founders who realize they simply can’t grow without them.

If you touch real payment networks, you touch KYC somewhere.

If you want institutional counterparties, you need guardrails.

If you touch credit, identity, or real-world assets, “everyone stays invisible” stops working fast.

Parts of the on-chain economy will stay fully anonymous and unregulated. That’s a feature. But it’s naive to think that’s where most economic activity will live.

The “you’ll all become like us eventually” mentality avoids doing hard work on problem solving, distribution, and business models. You can feel the fatigue now when hype doesn’t translate into durable adoption or returns. That’s not just macro. It’s the ceiling of building only for ourselves.

Crypto as the backend of the world

If the old playbook is fading, what comes next?

I think about it in three layers.

1) The infrastructure layer: quiet, boring, huge

Blockchains become default rails in certain domains: settlement for specific kinds of payments and markets, cross-border flows where stablecoins are simply better, shared state for things like identity, collateral, and ownership records.

Most users never know or care that it’s “on-chain.” They just experience faster settlement, more reliable access, global reach by default, and money that’s programmable in ways their bank never was.

2) The product layer: not “crypto products,” just products

Apps in fintech, commerce, and beyond are on-chain when it actually helps, hide complexity aggressively, and compete on the same axes every other product competes on: price, speed, UX, trust.

They don’t market themselves as “on-chain.” They market themselves as cheaper, faster, more global, more composable, and sometimes more fair.

3) The speculation layer: persistent, but contextualized

The casino doesn’t vanish. It just stops being the whole story. There will always be things like memecoins, exotic derivatives, and purely speculative venues. Some stay fringe while some blur into mainstream trading and entertainment. None of it needs to disappear.

The key change is that this becomes one vertical inside a larger landscape, not the foundation of the entire “industry.”

The endgame is crypto dissolving into the stack, not standing apart from it.

Winners and losers

If crypto becomes a layer in everything else, incentives change.

For builders

Losers: teams building only for CT and the same small ring of on-chain addresses; founders whose primary skill is farms, points programs, and emissions schedules.

Winners: teams that start from real user problems and use crypto as an implementation detail; founders willing to be boring where it matters (trust, compliance, distribution).

For investors

Losers: funds whose thesis is “crypto for crypto people” and who underwrite reflexivity as a business model.

Winners: investors underwriting demand, retention, and paths to durable distribution in broad markets (payments, credit, identity, markets, data).

For the existing industry

Losers: people whose identity is “I was early; the world must adapt to me”; ecosystems that refuse integration and insist “pure crypto” is the only correct version.

Winners: teams that ship rails and products that real users love and or depend on, plug into existing financial and consumer flows, and collaborate when it brings new demand on-chain. Embedding into the real economy is where the enduring, massive wins sit.

The pain of letting go

If you’ve spent a long time in this space, this is hard to accept.

When you’ve been in the bunker for years, it’s tough to hear "the bunker is closing, the war moved somewhere else." It feels like a betrayal of the time, energy, and conviction you put into defending the thing when it was much less accepted.

A lot of people’s identities are built around being early, being different, playing a game the rest of the world doesn’t understand. The idea that the world might adopt the tools but not the identity lands like a kind of loss.

But this is the normal arc of successful technologies.

The internet “died” as a subculture when it became boring and ubiquitous. “Cloud” stopped being an exciting frontier the moment every serious company quietly adopted it. Nobody mourns those deaths now. They were the cost of winning.

Crypto maturing means crypto, as we’ve known it, has to die. That’s not a failure. It’s the bill coming due for what we said we wanted.

Crypto is dead. Long live crypto.

If we get this right, we stop talking about “crypto adoption” as its own thing.

We talk instead about:

Products and businesses that depend on these rails

Markets that are more global, more open, and more programmable than the ones they replace

People whose lives look different because they had access to tools their local banking system would never have given them

You can cling to the insular, self-referential industry we built and hope the world eventually agrees to walk into it. Or you can accept that phase is ending and start building and investing for everyone else.

The mission was never to make everyone crypto-native. The mission was to make the world better with the tools we built, even if the world forgets what they’re called.

If you’re a builder or investor, ask yourself a blunt question:

Am I solving for crypto natives or am I solving for the world?

Your answer will decide which side of this obituary you end up on.