Every cycle ends the same way. The tourists leave, the headlines dry up, and the people who stayed through the carnage look around at what’s left. What’s left right now is more interesting than anything we had at the peak.
Let me explain where I think we actually are.
But first let me just say… I am no financial advisor. However, I’ve been in the crypto space long enough to live through multiple cycles and notice the same patterns we’re seeing today.
The Last Cycle Was Real — And Also Ridiculous
The 2020–2022 run was genuinely historic. DeFi went from a niche experiment to billions in TVL. Layer 2s entered the space in abundance. Ethereum shipped the merge. Cross-chain infrastructure matured. Real engineers shipped real things.
And also: a JPEG of a bored ape sold for $3.4 million. A dog-themed token with no utility hit a $90 billion market cap. A Ponzi disguised as an algorithmic stablecoin wiped out $40 billion in a weekend. A celebrity launched a token, got paid to promote it, and dumped on retail within 72 hours.
Both of these things were true simultaneously. The legitimate technological progress and the absolute circus existed in the same space, at the same time, feeding off the same liquidity.
That era is over. And I think that’s a good thing.
What the Hangover Revealed
Bear markets are clarifying. When the price stops going up, you find out fast who was building and who was just showing up for the party.
What we found out:
Most NFT projects were not art or community — they were exit liquidity. The ones that survive are the ones that built actual utility, actual culture, or actual infrastructure around the token. That’s a small list.
Most DeFi yield was circular. Protocols paying 1000% APY in their own governance token were essentially printing money and calling it a business model. The yields that survived are the ones backed by real economic activity — lending, trading fees, real-world asset returns.
The “next Ethereum killers” mostly didn’t. A few L1s built genuine ecosystems. Most accumulated venture capital, launched with fanfare, and slowly faded as developers stayed where the users were.
What’s left after the shakeout is harder to hype but much harder to kill.
Where We Are in the Cycle
We’re in the early innings of institutional adoption — and I mean that precisely, not as hype.
BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF crossed $50 billion in AUM faster than any ETF in history. That’s not a speculative signal. That’s trillions of dollars in legacy capital infrastructure deciding that Bitcoin is a legitimate asset class.
Tokenized real-world assets — treasury bills, money market funds, private credit, real estate — are growing at a rate that makes the 2021 NFT market look slow. Franklin Templeton. Fidelity. JPMorgan. These are the institutions that manage retirement accounts for half of America quietly building on-chain infrastructure.
Stablecoins processed more payment volume last year than Visa. Not in DeFi — in actual cross-border payments, payroll, and settlement.
Don’t believe me?
- Stablecoin settlement volume hit $33 trillion in 2025 — more than double Visa’s $16.7 trillion. (Visual Capitalist)
- B2B stablecoin payment volume surged 30x in two years, from under $100M/month in early 2023 to over $3B/month by 2025. (REAP)
- Actual payment-use stablecoin volume (excluding DeFi/trading) grew 85% year-over-year to $11.1 trillion in 2025. (Artemis)
- Total stablecoin supply grew from $5B to over $305 billion. (Fireblocks)
None of this is accompanied by a dog with a laser-eye Twitter profile. It’s boring and unglamorous and it’s the most important thing happening in the space.
The Maturation Pattern
Every transformative technology goes through the same arc. The internet had its bubble — pets.com, Webvan, the NASDAQ crash of 2000. The companies that looked like idiotic speculation in 2001 (Amazon, Google) turned out to be the infrastructure of the next 25 years. The ones that looked like sure things (AOL, Yahoo) slowly became irrelevant.
What’s happening in crypto right now maps onto that pattern almost exactly:
- The speculative froth burned off
- The serious infrastructure builders kept building
- Regulatory clarity is arriving (slowly, imperfectly, but arriving)
- Institutional capital is building access products for mainstream investors
- Real use cases — payments, settlement, asset tokenization, identity — are getting production traction
We’re somewhere around 2003 for the internet. The crash happened. The cleanup is mostly done. The people who survived are building the things that matter.
What This Means for Builders
If you’re building in this space right now, the opportunity set is genuinely different than it was in 2021.
In 2021, you could raise money on a deck, launch a token, and let the market do the work. That window is closed. What’s open now is harder and more durable: building products that work, solving real problems, and integrating with the institutional infrastructure that’s starting to take shape.
The projects getting real traction right now are the ones connecting on-chain infrastructure to off-chain reality. RWA protocols. Compliant stablecoins. On-chain credit. Cross-border payment rails. Settlement layers for traditional finance. These aren’t as exciting to tweet about as a new L1 with a 10,000x promise — but they’re actually getting used.
The bar is higher. The reward for clearing it is proportionally larger.
The Part People Get Wrong
The most common mistake I see — from both inside and outside the space — is treating this as a binary: either crypto is the future of everything, or it was all a scam and nothing matters.
Neither is right.
It was never going to replace everything. And it was never all a scam. The technology is real. The applications that survived the bear market is real. The institutional adoption happening right now is real.
What crypto is becoming is more boring, more regulated, and more useful than what it was in 2021. That’s what maturity looks like.