Why crypto is not that fun anymore

Yesterday, a tweet struck a nerve. It surfaced a shared yet quiet hopelessness - many of us aren't having fun working here anymore.

This is the longer version.

If you're not working in stablecoins, or you're not a deeply passionate person about financial markets, you're probably not having any fun in crypto right now.

And to make it worse, you're watching AI move at a speed and excitement level that makes your daily work feel like it's standing still. I know this because that was exactly how I felt. That's why I wrote the tweet.

And the fact that it resonated with so many (I've gotten 60 DMs so far) tells me a lot of you feel the same way but just haven't said it out loud.

So let me say some of the quiet parts out loud.

Selling to crypto developers is done

In the previous meta, it was fine to sell to crypto developers. Metrics mattered more than revenue. Logos mattered more than revenue. A vibe mattered more than revenue. You were a cost line item and people were spending.

That meta has been dead for about 18 months now. We wish we'd moved on faster.

There's also a growing consensus today that crypto is only good for finance. Haseeb from Dragonfly has said it. Kyle from Multicoin has said it. Toly from Solana has said it. Most of you believe it too, even if you won't say it in public.

I understand why people land there. Most tokens are meme coins. They don't own anything and they can't owe you anything, because the only thing you can truly own are onchain states which are extremely limiting.

This is also why crypto-native applications like trading and lending are the only two categories that actually make money onchain.

But a lot of us don't build in DeFi. A lot of us build infrastructure to enable new use cases outside of DeFi. And here's the uncomfortable truth: from our analysis, the entire addressable market for that work is probably around $2-300 million a year. Split among hundreds of organizations. The most successful ones generate double-digit millions. After years of maturation, that's the ceiling.

That gives you a very clear set of choices if you're building a venture-scale business. If you want to serve crypto developers, the market is small. So you either put on suits and sell your infrastructure to traditional finance, or, like a lot of others you wind down and leave for AI.

Many leave for AI because they know their own strengths. They know their team's expertise. And they know their competitive advantage is not doing long, sophisticated B2B sales cycles in traditional finance. That's why so many of you feel lost right now.

The crypto x AI dead ends

So you look at the one area that feels alive -- the intersection of crypto and AI -- and you try to find your footing. But the options aren't great either.

Option one: traditional business + AI with a token. The token doesn't do anything, just like most other tokens. You're basically building a normal product and slapping financialization on top. It's demoralizing because you played that game for 5 years already.

Option two: decentralized AI infrastructure. Privacy, safety, verifiability: the missionary route, the old meta. But I suspect it's not for a lot of you: few want to play another long-range religion-building exercise without something immediate to get feedback from, to get revenue from.

Option three: stablecoin infrastructure for agents. This one is interesting from a business perspective, but it's extremely competitive. Circle, Stripe, and every major stablecoin player are going hard at it. As a startup, picking a fight with them when there's no clear beachhead you can claim. It's frustrating.

The menu, and why people leave

So here's what's actually on the table today:

You can stay in the religious realm of crypto and build for the resilient, decentralized future.

You can put on suits, join the big players, and preach the gospel of stablecoin.

You can build a pick-and-shovel company for the stablecoin ecosystem.

You can continue in DeFi: trading, lending, and the financial plumbing of the internet.

Or you can build a niche product that doesn't have a chance for a billion-dollar venture outcome but makes real money and real users happy.

Beyond that, you don't have great choices. That's why you're most likely going to leave for AI. And honestly, I get it.

This is why crypto is not that fun anymore.

Everything above is my diagnosis. It's what I've spent six months feeling, analyzing, and pressure-testing. If you came here for the honest read on why crypto feels stuck, you have it. Feel free to close this now. Take a walk, touch grass.

But I'll tell you this: I've never been more excited about the work I'm doing. The last time I felt this way was probably when I first heard about what crypto is and what it could do. And this isn't just me -- it's everyone around me as well. So if you want to hear the short version of what I believe, read on.

Just know that from here on, I'm selling my belief.

What I actually think is interesting

For the past six months, the question I've been trying to answer is: how do you find something with a large enough market, a clear business model rooted in crypto, and a product-oriented non-finance solution that people both inside and outside of crypto can use?

Here's what I keep coming back to. Crypto is superconductor of capital. Capital fuels growth. The problem in the past is that we've been fueling things that don't grow -- putting gasoline on ice and wishing it would burn hotter.

AI has made it radically easier to make things grow, to start something useful -- product-wise. One person can now build what used to take a team of fifty. The cost of creating a real product, a real business, is collapsing. These things are growing fast, with revenue, real users, real feedback loops. They need fuel to accelerate. And crypto is the best fuel mechanism ever invented for exactly this purpose.

That's the only interesting question I see right now: how do you take crypto's superpower -- instant, global, programmable capital formation -- and point it at things that are actually growing? We think the answer is agent companies. To make that a reality, first you need to allow tokens to "own" things, and coincidentally we spent the last 5 years building that. Now we are going to turn that into a product and realize that goal.

If any of this resonates, if you're excited about our direction, want to build with us, or want to explore partnering, DM me.

If you have a friend who might resonate with this, share it with them. In my view, the people who are not settling for the current right now are exactly the people who should be building what comes next.