What we're seeing right now among our clients is pretty straightforward: the garbage is getting flushed out. Projects that were always vaporware or just speculation plays are losing steam & nobody's surprised by that. The crypto projects that solve real problems is definitely where the money is moving. The investors coming through our want to know what the thing actually does, who's using it & what adoption looks like over the next year and ten years. Stablecoins are probably the clearest signal that something real is happening. After the Genius Act passed, we started seeing an increased interest from institutions that wouldn't touch this stuff before & they're buying because they can finally see regulatory clarity and actual use cases they understand for their business. Will every project survive? Definitely not, But calling crypto "dead" because unfortunaetly a lot of projects provide no inherent utility ignores that the 10% with real utility are getting stronger. The infrastructure is getting built whether people are paying attention to those assets or not. If you're watching where capital is flowing and what's getting built, you'd have a hard time making that case now.
Matthew A. Schneider is CEO of Building Inc, a company advancing real estate tokenization, digital asset securitization, and AI-driven property intelligence. Since 2020, he has led blockchain integration, digital twin development, and data-driven asset management for over $120M in real estate. -- The current 'perception' of crypto is surely dead. But digital assets are here to stay. Over the past two years, we have witnessed the crypto industry come full circle — beginning with harsh criticism of the technology and its impact on capital markets, to very relaxed regulation and a massive influx of institutional and retail capital, and then back to criticism of the unpredictable, volatile, seemingly manipulated market it has become (but arguably always has been). To say that the current perception of crypto is dead means that patience and tolerance that institutions and retail have offered the industry for years is now dissolving. People want real use cases of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, and that means silencing most of the noise in the industry that brought it so much attention in the first place. A strong example would be World Liberty Financial; it turned heads to see Donald Trump Jr. attending global events and discussing how the United States would become the "Crypto Capitol." What became of the campaign besides the Trump family pocketing retail capital? But what about blockchain technology, in general? It's actually stronger than ever. Years of research from financial institutions, consortium organizations, and savvy enterprises has revealed that decentralized ledger technology can deliver significant benefits to a variety of workflows, including increased transparency, automation, reduced dependency on intermediaries, and cross-border interoperability. Atop these blockchains are robust digital assets — not necessarily cryptocurrencies of the kind that most people know — that are carrying loads of information and value. A large amount of the new value being transferred is derived from existing assets or financial instruments; these are called Real World Assets (RWA). The process of moving their value onto a blockchain and transacting in that manner is the "tokenization" of RWA. Tokenization deserves the spotlight, too; compared to most cryptocurrencies, which are solutions looking for problems, tokenization address numerous issues in legacy industries. Its adoption is accelerating and will become the ultimate use case for blockchain.
When you hear people say "crypto is dead," what do you think they actually mean? What metrics do you personally look at to decide whether crypto is dying or evolving? What would need to happen for you to confidently say crypto is dead? What would convince skeptics that crypto is far from dead? How much of crypto's "death narrative" is media-driven vs. grounded in reality? I started with bitcoin ATMs in 2014. I've been thorough every "cycle". There has been more evolution in the past year than at anytime since 2014. I don't think crypto will ever die. Skeptics usually have an agenda and are talking their book. The generation that grew up with crypto think it is perfectly normal. 80% of the death narrative is media and 20% is the people who just joined various crypto communities within the past 24 months.
When people declare cryptocurrency has died, it's typically those expecting the rapid price increases they have experienced are gone. When the subsequent crash of a 300% increase looks like the final act, it's because their enthusiasm has faded away from watching how people are using block space, what wallets are being used and how people are settling. The steady rail underneath continues to move money value as quietly as ever, but rarely gets noticed by the general public. The basis for my opinion about how well the blockchain ecosystem is functioning are the data points that normally do not get reported by mainstream media outlets. The number of developers who participate with a project, the integrity of its security, and the daily volume of stable coin transactions over $1 Billion per day are the three primary indicators as to whether this system has a sustainable future ahead of it or will be declining. It's going to take an extended decline in all of these components before you can say there was a complete failure of the system. Those skeptical of this type of development often become believers when they see their employer paying them via blockchain and sending them a $50,000 retainer for work done via blockchain, because those types of settlements are quicker and have less financial overhead then the traditional ways of doing business.
When people say crypto is dead it generally means the days of being able to speculate on anything are done, but this does not mean that the underlying blockchain technology has vanished. The average investor watched their token drop by as much as 90% and assumed that the entire ecosystem was gone when in reality most were quietly working at building a better future through licenses and infrastructure that will be used long after the speculators have lost all of their money. I am professionally focused on whether there are serious teams and regulated money left that are writing legitimate invoices for their work. While there may be a lot of developers, audit and compliance people working at $400,000 per month on a network, as long as they have some spend on a network, this part of Crypto is alive. In order to tell when it's truly dead, I need to see on-chain settlements going down to zero, all compliance budgets being reduced to zero, and regulators continually canceling instead of approving new licenses. Until we get those signs, it will be a story of a market cooling off, rather than a funeral.