Crypto Community Calls for Reset Amid Rapid Industry Evolution

In the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency, the industry has seen significant developments over the past half-year, equivalent to about three regular years in crypto time. Major events include administration changes, regulatory advancements, Bitcoin all-time highs, concerning breaches, and big IPOs. New narratives have emerged, focusing on fresh layer-1s, infrastructure conversations dominated by L2s, an evolving DeFi stack, and the accelerating convergence of AI and blockchain. However, there is a growing sense of unrest within the crypto community, with many calling for a reset and a return to building real products that solve real problems for real users.

The crypto landscape is unlike any other in tech, operating under different rules and dynamics. To better understand this world, it can be helpful to think of the crypto landscape as more like places than products. Blockchains are not companies; they are frontier towns in a newly discovered land. Each layer-1 blockchain, such as Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin, is like a frontier town built on untamed land. These towns are primitive at first, with early settlers believing in the potential value of the land despite its current risks and volatility. Each L1 town competes to attract settlers and capital, with different pitches based on natural resources, fertile soil, or strategic location.

Layer 2s, such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and ZKsync, are the infrastructure that makes these towns livable. They are the roads, railways, and utilities that connect remote settlements to trade networks and provide essential services. Without them, most people wouldn’t settle in these rough environments. Rollups, zk-tech, and bridges are technologies that reduce congestion, improve speed, and make it feasible to imagine towns becoming cities. The current moment in crypto is a race to lay down the interstate system in preparation for a wave of expected settlers.

DeFi protocols are the general stores, trading posts, and banks of the frontier. They let people exchange value, take out loans to build more infrastructure, and speculate on which towns will prosper. They are risky but necessary to bootstrap a local economy. With the rapid advancement of AI and concerns over centralized "Big AI" companies, the crypto space might find a killer use case that matters. If blockchains are towns, then AI is the gold buried in the surrounding hills. Blockchain provides the ledger, the incentive structure, and the ethical scaffolding needed for AI governance and provenance.

Several projects are making their bids for the gold rush in the machine economy, including NEAR, Peaq, and Akash. However, it remains to be seen whether this value can be easily extracted or requires a complete rethinking of the terrain. The frontier metaphor helps explain why crypto feels both chaotic and inevitable. It behaves more like a territorial expansion than a technology cycle. While not every outpost will survive, the landscape will be littered with ghost towns, and the gold rush is surely not over with the maturing of the category and convergence of technologies like AI.

Every single crypto project faces the dual mandate of getting speculators excited and recruiting builders and entrepreneurs. This becomes a chicken-and-egg problem, as both speculators and builders want to see users. However, the average person still lives in well-established cities with reliable services and functioning economies. The frontier is messy, with buggy apps, high gas fees, and bad UX. Moving to the crypto frontier still requires conviction or an extremely high risk tolerance. But the people building these towns believe that eventually, the infrastructure will catch up, and the advantages of sovereignty, transparency, and economic participation will be too compelling to ignore.