(Crypto is dead) This article has been very popular recently, and after reading it, I do not feel the anger of being 'offended', but rather a complete relief as if the window paper has been pierced. As a 'veteran' who has been in the circle for 8 years, I have experienced the frenzy of ICOs and endured the all-nighters of DeFi summer. But to be honest, the daily work of these two years has increasingly given me a sense of loneliness of 'dancing on an island.'
1. We are 'involution' in a pool heading towards exhaustion
As mentioned in the text, the current cryptocurrency industry resembles a high-threshold MMO online game too much. Every day I open Telegram and scroll through Twitter, and everywhere I look, there are points, airdrops, and various complex interaction protocols. Our various 'innovations' are actually teaching those hundreds of thousands of old players how to elegantly pick each other's pockets. Recently researched projects have white papers that are beautifully written, but when asked the core question: 'Besides this group of people in the circle, who will use it?' the founders often fall silent. We have become accustomed to treating 'self-amusement' as 'market demand.'
2. What remains when you take away the 'Crypto' facade?
I used to think 'Crypto Native' was a cool badge, but now it seems more like a wall. In my trading experience, what truly made me feel the power of technology wasn't those complex arbitrage models, but when I saw a friend from Southeast Asia bypassing extremely inefficient local banks to directly remit money to family using USDT. At that moment, he didn't need to know what 'Rollup' was; he just knew that this thing worked.
3. Future opportunities are found in the 'disappearance'.
The most poignant and clear point in the article is that the death of Crypto as an independent industry is actually its rebirth as infrastructure. The future winners will no longer be those geeks shouting 'disrupt the world', but rather the entrepreneurs who hide blockchain in the background, making it accessible for ordinary people without perceiving barriers. If a product still requires users to manually write down mnemonic phrases or understand Gas fees, it is destined to fail in reaching the masses. Crypto should not be a personality but a tool. We don't need to cling to that narrow 'circle identity'. Acknowledging that 'the old path is no longer viable' is not shameful; on the contrary, bringing these useful tools into the real world to solve the real issues of slow transfers, trust difficulties, and opaque rules is the true value of what we have maintained for 8 years.
Crypto is dead, but the era belonging to blockchain has just begun.
Personal speculation - shorting near 92000 tonight.