Should You Still Believe in Crypto

Author: BlockBeats

 

If you’ve been in the crypto industry these past few years, you must have felt the growing sense of “burnout.”

Last weekend, Aevo co-founder Ken Chan’s lengthy article undoubtedly struck a chord with many. He used an extreme title—“I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in the Crypto Industry.”

This isn’t just one person’s state, but a collective exhaustion among industry participants. Ken wrote out a truth that many are afraid to admit: in the crypto industry, it’s really easy to lose track of time.

Nothing Comes Out of Nowhere

You might stay up late for airdrops, watch the charts for new listings, chase narratives up and down, spend all night researching a new protocol, or participate in countless unpaid community governance tasks. From the romanticism of libertarianism, to on-chain governance experiments, to today’s meme, perpetuals, and gambling-driven sectors running wild—these are enough to make one question: are we really participating in a technological revolution, or just working for an endlessly greedy casino?

The doubts of industry practitioners aren’t due to a lack of conviction, but because of the crypto industry’s harsh structure: narrative lifecycles are shorter than product lifecycles; hype outweighs fundamentals; speculation moves far faster than actual building; hero worship and collective skepticism coexist; for many projects, the endgame isn’t failure, but disappearance.

To be honest, many people have experienced Ken’s feelings. And these doubts are not unfounded.

“What are we really holding on to?”—this question may weigh far more than “Will the price of bitcoin go up?”

So when we say “we believe in crypto,” what exactly are we believing in? Are we believing in project teams? No. Are we believing in some star KOL? Of course not. Are we believing in a series of narratives? Even less so.

Many people suddenly realize: what they’ve truly believed in all along may only be one thing: we are still holding on to and believing in the significance of crypto for the world.

So right after Ken’s article went viral, Castle Island Ventures co-founder Nic Carter quickly wrote a response—“I Don’t Regret Spending Eight Years in Crypto.”

What is the significance of crypto for the world? Nic Carter gave his five points: making monetary systems more robust, encoding business logic with smart contracts, making digital property rights real, improving capital market efficiency, and expanding global financial inclusion.

Don’t Forget Why We Started

Whenever the industry falls into chaos, perhaps we can all reread the bitcoin whitepaper.

A peer-to-peer electronic cash system—this is the first sentence of the whitepaper.

In 2008, the financial crisis struck, banks collapsed, Lehman Brothers fell with a bang. Financiers and politicians made the whole world pay for their risks and mistakes.

The birth of bitcoin was not to create wealth, but to answer a question: “Can we build a monetary system that doesn’t rely on any centralized institution?”

This was the first time in history that humanity had a currency that didn’t require trust in anyone. It’s the only truly global financial system that doesn’t belong to any country, company, or individual. You can criticize ETH, criticize Solana, criticize all L2s, criticize all DEXs, but few criticize bitcoin, because its original intention has never changed.

Any Web2 company can close your account tomorrow; but no one can stop you from sending a bitcoin transaction tomorrow. There will always be people who dislike it, don’t believe in it, or even attack it, but no one can change it.

Water does not contend, yet it benefits all things.

With global inflation normalized, sovereign debt soaring, asset shortages after long-term declines in risk-free rates, financial repression, and lack of privacy... the existence of these problems means the vision of the crypto industry is not outdated, but even more urgent. As Nic Carter said: “I’ve never seen a technology that can upgrade capital market infrastructure more than crypto.”

Why This Is Not a Failed Industry

Ken said he wasted eight years. But did we really waste our youth?

In hyperinflationary countries like Argentina, Turkey, and Venezuela, BTC and stablecoins have already become de facto “shadow financial systems”; hundreds of millions who couldn’t access banking now own global digital assets for the first time; humanity for the first time has assets it can control itself; international payments no longer require banks; billions can access the same financial system for the first time; financial infrastructure is starting to transcend national borders; an asset not reliant on violence or power is gaining global recognition...

For a high-inflation country, a stable, non-depreciating currency is like a Noah’s Ark, which is why stablecoins account for 61.8% of Argentina’s crypto trading volume. For freelancers, digital nomads, and the wealthy with overseas business, USDT is their digital dollar.

Compared to hiding dollars under the mattress or risking black market exchanges, clicking a mouse to swap pesos for USDT seems much more elegant and safe.

Whether it’s a street vendor’s cash transaction or an elite’s USDT transfer, at its core it’s a distrust of national credit and a protection of private property. In a country with high taxes, low welfare, and constant currency devaluation, every “grey transaction” is a rebellion against institutionalized plunder.

For a hundred years, the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires has changed hands again and again, and the peso has been scrapped over and over. But ordinary people, relying on underground transactions and grey-market ingenuity, have managed to find a way out of dead ends.

Almost all of the world’s top 20 funds have set up Web3 departments; TradFi institutions continue to pour in (BlackRock, Fidelity, CME); national digital currency systems use bitcoin as a reference; digital asset ETFs across the US are setting new inflow records; in just 15 years, bitcoin has already become one of the world’s top ten financial assets...

Even with bubbles, speculation, chaos, and scams, some facts have already happened. These changes have indeed altered the world, even if just a little. And we are standing in an industry that will continue to reshape the global financial structure.

Have We Really Left Nothing Behind?

Many people still ask: “If, 15 years from now, all these chains are gone, all the projects are gone, and all the protocols have been replaced by more advanced infrastructure, isn’t what we’re doing now still a waste of youth?”

Let’s look at another industry: in 2000, the internet bubble burst and NASDAQ plunged 78%; in 1995, Amazon was mocked as “just a book-selling website”; in 1998, Google was considered “not as good as Yahoo”; in 2006, social networks were seen as “teenage rebellion.”

The early days of the internet were full of: thousands of failed startups; innovations that disappeared completely; massive investments lost; tens of thousands of people thinking they wasted their youth.

Early BBS, portals, dial-up internet, paid email—almost none of these exist today, and 90% of the first generation of mobile internet products didn’t survive. But they were not a “waste”—they formed the soil of the mobile era.

The infrastructure they created—browsers, TCP/IP, early servers, compilers—enabled Facebook, Google, Apple, mobile internet, cloud computing, and AI. The history of social networks is a cycle of constant fragmentation, just as today’s TikTok is built on countless dead social networks.

Each generation replaces the last, but no generation is in vain.

No industry’s path is clean, linear, clear, correct, or has obvious answers. All foundational technology industries go through chaos, bubbles, trial and error, and misunderstanding—until they change the world.

The crypto industry is the same.

The technological revolution in crypto has never been accomplished by a single generation. Everything we do—even if ETH is replaced by another chain in the future, L2s are rewritten with new architectures, and all the DEXs we use today disappear—will never be in vain.

Because what we provide is the foundational soil, the trial and error, the parameters, the social experiments, the path dependence, the experience and samples to be absorbed by the future. Not the endgame itself.

Besides, you are not alone in your persistence.

There are still millions of developers, researchers, fund managers, node operators, builders, and traders around the world, pushing this era forward, slowly but surely. We are with you.

—Written for those still on this path.