The tragedy of cryptocurrencies. Users still need transaction privacy, and vendors outside the sunny realm of expurgated pop culture still need a cash equivalent that can’t be clawed back. But if you build that, the people who show up are mostly gamblers. The good news is that facilitating gambling can make orders of magnitude more money than a private payment processor that can’t get your money back if someone scams you. The bad news is that it may not be possible to build the business you wanted to build at all, because if all the revenue comes from gambling, that’s where you have to spend all your attention too.
The irony of crypto’s 2025 collapse is that the technology worked. The Ethereum network processes transactions reliably. Layer 2 solutions have made fees manageable. Smart contracts execute as written. The decentralized exchange infrastructure handles billions in volume. The pipes do what pipes are supposed to do. What failed was the civilization we were supposed to build on top of them. What failed was…well, us.