Everyone Is Getting Tired of the Crypto Industry.

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Building in crypto these past 18 months hasn't felt good. Any shred of legitimacy is being overshadowed by the incessant need by CEXes, VCs, and market makers to get more tokens to pump and dump.

This need is driven by the incredible volatility that sent balance sheets soaring in 2021 and sent them back to earth in 2022. Market participants raised more money, raised their standards of living, and needed to extract more capital than our hollowed-out industry had left to give.

A lot of industry players moved further out on the risk curve. They shed the values that got them into crypto in the first place. The success of the memecoin segment is a direct result of liquid funds desperately needing to outperform in a market where serious bidders had already left.

We the builders, retail investors, and value enjoyers are left to justify our work to a world that largely sees crypto as a scam. Lately, it's feeling a lot like they're right.

We're all tired of zero-sum games.

venture anthropologist @0xBalloonLover in the zero sum token meta everyone doing deals needs to convince their counterparty that someone else is getting rekt team convincing investor, team convincing airdrop farmer, founder convincing employees they will dump on retail together 6:0 AM • Mar 12, 2024 1 Retweets 43 Likes Read 1 replies

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Noah @TraderNoah http://x.com/i/article/1917315355439161346 10:9 AM • Apr 30, 2025 2 Retweets 40 Likes Read 2 replies

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samczsun @samczsun should i coin this? 9:51 PM • Apr 28, 2025 102 Retweets 1500 Likes Read 94 replies

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Mike Dudas @mdudas I’m going to start talking about this stuff more. The incidence of bad founder and investor activity in crypto is nearly an order of magnitude higher than in traditional tech markets. We said we would self police but people are too wimpy or $ conflicted to do it. Must change. Mike Dudas @mdudas Sam Thapaliya is the only founder I’ve ever wired to and asked for my money back. We found out he’d used someone else’s IP to build Zebpay. https://twitter.com/skesslr/status/1917536994538000423 5:39 AM • Apr 30, 2025 8 Retweets 181 Likes Read 22 replies

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Builders are Leaving

AzFlin 🌎 @AzFlin AI is genuinely more interesting space than crypto I'm only here because i have more history/experience in crypto, but if i were to start new i would choose to build in AI everytime 6:52 PM • Apr 26, 2025 5 Retweets 247 Likes Read 47 replies

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Jeffrey Scholz @Jeyffre EatTheBlocks pivoted from crypto to AI — for reasons that everyone has been feeling. Crypto isn’t getting adopted, it’s full of scams, and the primary usecase is gambling. Feels like the end of an era. Yeah it’s a bear market, but this one feels different. For those wondering, 8:17 PM • Apr 29, 2025 4 Retweets 176 Likes Read 22 replies

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The Worst-Case Scenario

What cruel world would force us to admit Jason was right...

@jason @Jason If you’re in crypto pivot to AI 11:28 AM • Jun 8, 2023 229 Retweets 2160 Likes Read 1184 replies

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Fear Mongering

After getting extorted, our Sophon grant getting rugged, and laying off more than 15 people this month, you can imagine why my opinion of crypto is skewing a bit negative.

Overall, though, I feel that there's still a lot of good being done - mainly in Stablecoins and DeFi. Ethereum is still awesome, Hyperliquid is amazing, projects like Pendle and Gammaswap are inspiring, but the crypto primary market is devolving into a clown show.

VCs and influencers need to get their acts together if crypto is going to be taken seriously in the future.