Should You Still Believe in Crypto

If you have been in the crypto industry for the past few years, you must have felt the growing sense of "burnout."

Last weekend, the long article by Aevo co-founder Ken Chan undoubtedly struck a chord with many people. He used an extreme title—"I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto."

This is not just one person's state, but a collective exhaustion among industry participants. Ken wrote out a truth that many dare not admit: in the crypto industry, it is truly easy to lose track of time.

Nothing Comes Out of Nowhere

You may have stayed up late for airdrops, watched the charts for new listings, chased narratives for gains and losses, spent whole nights researching new protocols, or participated in countless unpaid labor for community governance. From the romanticism of liberalism, to on-chain governance experiments, to today's meme, perpetuals, and gambling-driven sectors running wild, all of this is enough to make one question: Are we really participating in a technological revolution, or are we just working for an infinitely greedy casino?

The doubts of practitioners do not stem from a lack of conviction, but from the brutal structure of the crypto industry itself: narrative lifecycles are shorter than product lifecycles; hype outweighs fundamentals; speculation moves faster than building; hero worship and collective skepticism coexist; and the endgame for many projects is not 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?"—the weight of this question may be far heavier 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 one narrative after another? Even less so.

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

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

What is the significance of crypto to the world? Nic Carter gave his five points: making the monetary system healthier, 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 hit, banks collapsed, and Lehman Brothers fell with a crash. 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 does not rely on any centralized institution?"

This is the first time in history that humanity has had money that does not require trust in anyone. It is the only truly global financial system that does not belong to any country, company, or individual. You can criticize ETH, criticize Solana, criticize all L2s, criticize all DEXs, but few people 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 compete, yet it benefits all things.

With global inflation becoming the norm, 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 that the vision of the crypto industry is not outdated, but rather more urgent. As Nic Carter said: "I've never seen a technology that can drive capital market infrastructure upgrades more than crypto."

Why This Is Not a Failed Industry

Ken says 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 a de facto "shadow financial system"; hundreds of millions of people who could not access the banking system now own global digital assets for the first time; humanity has, for the first time, assets they can control themselves; international payments no longer require banks for the first time; billions of people can access the same financial system for the first time; financial infrastructure is starting to detach from national borders; and an asset that does not rely on violence or power is being recognized globally...

For a country with high inflation, 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 businesses, USDT is their digital dollar.

Compared to hiding dollars under the mattress or risking the black market for currency exchange, 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 wisdom, have managed to find a way out of dead ends. Related reading: "Underground Argentina: Jewish Money Houses, Chinese Supermarkets, Slacking Youth and the Impoverished Middle Class"

Almost all of the world's top 20 funds have established Web3 departments; TradFi institutions continue to pour in (BlackRock, Fidelity, CME); national digital currency systems are modeled after bitcoin; digital asset ETFs across the U.S. are setting new records for capital inflows; and 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 to some extent. 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, all the protocols have been replaced by more advanced infrastructure—doesn't that mean what we're doing now is 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 who thought they had wasted their youth.

Early BBS, portals, dial-up internet, paid email—almost none of these exist today, and 90% of first-generation mobile internet products did not survive. But they were by no means 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 previous one, but no generation is in vain.

No industry has ever developed in a clean, linear, clear, correct, and well-answered way. All foundational technology industries go through chaos, bubbles, trial and error, and misunderstanding—until they change the world.

The crypto industry is no different.

The technological revolution in crypto has never been completed 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 foundational soil, trial and error, parameters, social experiments, path dependence, and experiences 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 who are still on this path.