The trend is changing! Smart money is pulling out of $BTC and $ETH and pouring all in this "non-financial" sector. Are you still buying the dip?

Yesterday, I posted a tweet that unexpectedly struck a chord with many people. It described a pervasive sense of collective burnout within the industry: many of us, despite being involved, no longer feel joy.

If your current field is unrelated to stablecoins and you lack enthusiasm for traditional financial markets, your chances of finding enjoyment in crypto are already slim. The contrast is even starker with artificial intelligence, which is advancing at an astonishing speed and popularity, highlighting our daily work stagnation.

I have experienced this feeling myself, which is why I posted that tweet. Over sixty private messages confirmed the resonance—many people agree but choose to remain silent.

For businesses targeting developers, the market is saturated. In the last cycle, building tools for developers was a viable business model. Back then, data metrics, partner brands, and community atmosphere mattered more than actual revenue. You were seen as a necessary cost, and capital was willing to pay for it.

But that model ended about eighteen months ago. Now, a consensus is emerging: the core value of cryptocurrencies is solely financial. Haseeb from Dragonfly, Kyle from Multicoin, and Toly from Solana have all expressed similar views. Many agree internally but are reluctant to admit it publicly.

It’s easy to understand this conclusion. Most tokens in the market are meme coins, which have no real assets and make no promises. Therefore, in native crypto applications, only two types of on-chain revenue remain sustainable: trading and lending.

But many people are not involved in DeFi. They build infrastructure to support new applications outside finance. A harsh reality is that, based on our analysis, the total potential market size for this work is only about $200-300 million annually, spread across hundreds of projects.

The most successful projects earn only tens of millions of dollars per year. After years of development, this is the visible ceiling. For a company aiming for venture-scale funding, the choice is clear: the market for serving crypto developers is too small.

So, there are only two options: either pivot and sell your technology to traditional financial institutions; or, like many have already done, shift into AI. Many choose AI because they know their team’s strength isn’t in long, complex B2B sales, but in quickly building products.

This is the root of the current widespread confusion.

As a result, people are turning their attention to the last seemingly active field: the intersection of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. But the feasible paths are also limited.

First path: combine traditional business with AI, then issue a token. The token itself has no real utility, just like most tokens. Essentially, it’s layering finance onto a normal product. This approach has persisted for five years and is exhausting.

Second path: decentralized AI infrastructure. Focused on privacy, security, and verifiability, this is a typical evangelistic route. But few are willing to commit again to a long-term faith-based project lacking immediate feedback and revenue.

Third path: provide stablecoin infrastructure for AI agents. From a business perspective, this is interesting, but competition is fierce. Circle, Stripe, and all major stablecoin issuers are fighting hard for this market. As a startup without a clear breakthrough, competing head-on is discouraging.

So, the limited options currently on the table are: stay in the crypto “faith circle” building for an censorship-resistant, decentralized future; suit up and join big institutions to promote stablecoins; provide tools for the stablecoin ecosystem and earn “shovel money”; continue deep DeFi development to become the financial pipeline of the internet; or create a niche product that’s profitable and user-satisfying but unlikely to become a unicorn.

Beyond these, options are scarce. This also explains why so many are leaving for AI. I completely understand this choice. These are the reasons why the crypto world has become dull.

This is the conclusion I’ve reached after six months of observation, analysis, and repeated validation. If you just want to understand why the industry feels stagnant, the answer is here. You can close this article and go get some fresh air.

But I want to tell you, right now, I am more excited about what I’m doing than ever before. The last time I felt this way was when I first discovered crypto’s potential. So, if you’re willing to hear what I truly believe in, please continue.

I must clarify upfront: what follows is my personal philosophy.

Over the past six months, I’ve been trying to answer one question: how to find a market large enough, with a business model rooted in crypto, targeting non-financial products, and broadly adopted by users inside and outside the industry?

I’ve maintained one belief: cryptocurrencies are a superconductor of capital, driven by capital to grow. The problem in the past was that we kept pouring capital into things that wouldn’t grow, like pouring gasoline on ice, hoping it would burn.

AI, on the other hand, makes “creating useful, growth-capable new products” easier than ever. Tasks that once required fifty people can now be done by one. Building a truly revenue-generating, user-validated, feedback-looped product or business is becoming much cheaper.

These things grow rapidly and need fuel to accelerate. Cryptocurrency is the best mechanism ever to serve as that fuel.

This is the only truly interesting question I see now: how to apply crypto’s superpowers—instant, global, programmable capital formation—to things that are genuinely growing?

We believe the answer is: intelligent agent companies. The prerequisite is enabling tokens to “own” assets. Coincidentally, this has been our focus for the past five years. Now, we are productizing it to achieve this goal.

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