Lots of chatter about these being the twilight days of crypto as an “industry”. I hear these comments every cycle. This time the arguments are as follows: - Secular brain drain to AI since early 2024 - Predatory market makers destroyed retail interest with high FDV launches - Deceptive KOLs lured remaining capital to “fairer” games while sniping supply systematically, - BTC effectively pulling ahead and becoming its own thing separate from crypto, don’t need the rest - L1 “leadership” out of touch or fully embracing nihilism vs standing for something - No one can point to a new app that onboarded users en masse besides Pump fun, so crypto is good for nothing except scams and memes - Many VCs still radically out of touch and backing the 50th AI agent launchpad / zk yada/ L3 etc Many of these are valid critiques, and I’d argue most of the ailments are not new - they were just temporarily forgotten in Q4 2024 when prices rallied. I am optimistic many of these issues are self-correcting and will be resolved, but they must first be acknowledged for the industry to mature. I have noticed that people here (likely those who yap better than they manage risk) like to point fingers at others for their own inadequacies, dismiss these issues for being noise, or oversimplify the industry’s ailments by assigning blame to one party. But if it’s one thing I learnt over the years is it’s not the VCs, nor the exchanges, nor the MMs, nor the founders, nor the KOLs, nor the retails, nor Gensler, not even Do Kwon or SBF that led to where we are. It’s a sequential series of events that were almost destined to happen if you extend current state at any point in time to their logical extremes. It just so happens that crypto is great at almost always arriving at those extremes.