We spend a lot of time on the road meeting with LPs, fellow investors, and founders. No matter where the conversation starts – whether it’s in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, London, or anywhere else – it often drifts to a simple, sometimes rhetorical question: Is any of this real?
It’s a fair question. Crypto has become a strange reflection of our economy and society more broadly: part financial spectacle, part social experiment, part collective delusion. For every breakthrough in cryptography or blockchain infrastructure, there are ten new ways to speculate. The mood across the ecosystem has shifted. It’s not outrage or denial anymore…it’s fatigue.
Over the past few years, crypto has rotated through one speculative narrative after another: Layer 1 blockchains that quickly traded to huge valuations; NFTs that promised culture and delivered cash grabs; Metaverse real estate in the clouds; “Play-to-earn” games that collapsed before they even shipped. The most recent cycle brought us a flood of memecoins, which grew the universe of tokens from 20,000 in 2022 to over 27 million today, and now represent as much as 60%+ of daily application revenue on Solana. Then there are perpetual futures platforms that offer 100X leverage to largely retail traders.
