Should You Still Believe in Crypto?

If you’ve spent the past few years in crypto, you’ve likely felt the rising tide of burnout.

Last weekend, Aevo co-founder Ken Chan published a powerful essay that struck a chord with many. He used a provocative headline—“I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto”.

This isn’t just one person’s struggle. It’s a shared fatigue across the industry. Ken voiced a truth many hesitate to acknowledge: it’s easy to lose your sense of time in crypto.

None of This Happens Without Reason

You might stay up for airdrops, watch the markets for new launches, chase momentum trades driven by narratives, spend nights researching new protocols, or contribute countless unpaid hours to community governance. From the romance of libertarian ideals to on-chain governance experiments, and now to the wild surge of memes, perpetuals, and speculative trading, it’s enough to make anyone question: are we really part of a technological revolution, or just working for an insatiable casino?

People in the industry aren’t skeptical because they lack conviction. It’s the harsh structure of crypto itself: narrative cycles are shorter than product cycles; hype outweighs fundamentals; speculation moves faster than building; hero worship coexists with collective doubt; many projects don’t fail—they simply disappear.

Let’s be honest—Ken’s experience is common. These doubts are well-founded.

“What are we really holding on to?” That question carries far more weight than “Will Bitcoin’s price rise?”

So when we say “we believe in crypto,” what are we actually believing in? Are we trusting project teams? No. Are we relying on celebrity influencers? Definitely not. Are we buying into the latest narrative? Not a chance.

Many realize that what they truly believe in is just one thing: the meaning crypto brings to the world.

After Ken’s article went viral, Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, quickly published a response—“I Don’t Regret Spending Eight Years in Crypto”.

What does crypto mean for the world? Nic Carter offered five perspectives: making monetary systems more robust, encoding business logic with smart contracts, making digital property rights real, boosting capital market efficiency, and expanding global financial inclusion.

Remember Why We Started

Whenever the industry feels chaotic, maybe it’s time to reread the Bitcoin whitepaper.

A peer-to-peer electronic cash system—that’s the very first line.

In 2008, the financial crisis hit. Banks collapsed. Lehman Brothers fell. Financiers and politicians made the world pay for their risks and mistakes.

Bitcoin wasn’t created to make people rich. It was built to answer one question: “Can we build a monetary system that doesn’t depend on any centralized institution?”

For the first time in history, people had money that didn’t require trust in anyone. It’s the only financial system that truly belongs to no country, company, or individual. You can criticize ETH, Solana, any L2, or any DEX, but almost no one criticizes Bitcoin—its original mission has never changed.

Any Web2 company can close your account tomorrow. But no one can stop you from sending Bitcoin. People will always dislike, distrust, or even attack it, but nobody can change it.

Water benefits all things and does not compete.

Global inflation, soaring sovereign debt, asset shortages after years of declining risk-free rates, financial repression, and loss of privacy—all these issues make crypto’s vision more urgent than ever. As Nic Carter said, “I’ve never seen a technology that upgrades capital markets infrastructure better than crypto.”

Why This Isn’t a Failed Industry

Ken claims he wasted eight years. But have we really wasted our youth?

In places like Argentina, Turkey, and Venezuela—countries with hyperinflation—BTC and stablecoins have become real “shadow financial systems.” Hundreds of millions of people who couldn’t access banks now have global digital assets for the first time. Humanity now owns global assets they control themselves. International payments no longer require banks. Billions can access the same financial system. Financial infrastructure is breaking free from national borders. Assets not backed by violence or authority are gaining global recognition.

For countries suffering from high inflation, a stable currency is like Noah’s Ark. That’s why stablecoins make up 61.8% of Argentina’s crypto trading volume. For freelancers, digital nomads, and the wealthy with international business, USDT is their digital dollar.

Instead of hiding dollars under a mattress or risking black-market exchanges, clicking a mouse to convert pesos to USDT is far more elegant and safe.

Whether it’s a street vendor’s cash trade or an elite’s USDT transfer, it’s all about distrust in national credit and protecting private property. In countries with high taxes, low welfare, and constant currency devaluation, every “gray transaction” is an act of resistance against systemic exploitation.

For a hundred years, the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires has changed hands time and again, and the peso has been devalued over and over. Yet ordinary people, using underground trades and creative thinking, have found ways out of dead ends. For more, see: Underground Argentina: Jewish Money Houses, Chinese Supermarkets, Young People Who’ve Given Up, and the Middle Class Returning to Poverty

Almost every one of the world’s top 20 funds has launched a Web3 division. TradFi institutions keep pouring in (BlackRock, Fidelity, CME). National digital currency systems look to Bitcoin as a benchmark. US digital asset ETFs are hitting record inflows. In just 15 years, Bitcoin has become one of the world’s top ten financial assets.

Despite bubbles, speculation, chaos, and scams, some facts are undeniable. These changes have genuinely altered the world. We stand in an industry that will keep reshaping global finance.

Have We Really Left Nothing Behind?

Many still ask, “If all these chains, projects, and protocols are gone in 15 years, replaced by more advanced infrastructure, haven’t we wasted our youth?”

Let’s look at another industry: in 2000, the dot-com bubble burst and NASDAQ plunged 78%. In 1995, Amazon was mocked as “just a bookstore.” In 1998, Google was dismissed as “worse than Yahoo.” In 2006, social networks were seen as “teen rebellion.”

The early internet saw thousands of startups fail, innovations disappear, investments wiped out, and tens of thousands thinking they’d wasted their youth.

Early BBS, portals, dial-up internet, and paid email services are almost all gone. Ninety percent of first-generation mobile internet products didn’t survive. But they weren’t wasted—they became the soil for the mobile era.

That infrastructure—browsers, TCP/IP, early servers, compilers—enabled Facebook, Google, Apple, mobile internet, cloud computing, and AI. Social networks have always evolved through cycles of disruption. Today’s TikTok stands on the legacy of countless social networks that came before.

Every generation replaces the last, but none are pointless.

No industry advances in a clean, linear, or obvious way. Every foundational tech sector faces chaos, bubbles, trial and error, and misunderstanding—until it changes the world.

Crypto is no different.

This industry’s tech revolution has never been the work of a single generation. Everything we do—even if ETH is replaced, L2s are rewritten, and today’s DEXs disappear—will never be in vain.

We’re building the foundation, testing new ideas, setting parameters, running social experiments, creating path dependencies, and generating experiences and samples for the future—not the final outcome itself.

And you’re not alone.

Millions of developers, researchers, fund managers, node operators, builders, and traders worldwide are moving this era forward. We’re in this together.

—For everyone still on this journey.

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