八年行業回顧：加密最終走上了另一條更有價值的道路

Original Author: Connor Dempsey

Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

On Monday, I will start a new job. Before embarking on my fifth professional venture, I want to write this article to reflect on my eight-year journey through the crypto industry.

When I entered the crypto industry in 2017, I believed this technology would change everything.

Government fiat currencies would be replaced by decentralized tokens; blockchains would eliminate all the rent-seeking middlemen in the transaction chain; power would shift back from large corporations to ordinary users.

Looking back now, almost none of those initial visions have materialized, but the industry has instead taken a completely different path.

I have worked at four crypto companies over eight years, witnessing the industry's scale grow from less than $1 billion to over $4 trillion, enduring multiple speculative bubbles, and experiencing one systemic collapse. I have gradually realized that what the industry is actually building is far more valuable than I initially imagined.

Before starting my next job, I want to document what I have seen and heard, as well as my predictions for the industry's future direction.

The Illusory Frenzy of Wealth Creation: The ICO Craze of 2017-2018

In early 2017, I stumbled upon an introduction to Bitcoin in a book and was completely hooked. Soon after, I devoured every Bitcoin-related book I could find and conceived the idea of moving to Singapore to write a blog and delve deeper into this new technology.

At the time, I didn't realize I was at the tail end of the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) super-speculative bubble. ICOs allowed anyone to raise funds globally by selling cryptocurrencies to investors to crowdfund creative projects.

Ethereum was the star of this carnival.

In November 2017, I published a beginner'sguide to Ethereum in simple terms, which went viral on Reddit. It coincided with the peak of the bubble, which burst just a month later.

Reading that article now feels like a time capsule: it captured the euphoric optimism of the era and predicted a future that ultimately did not come true.

My main argument was that blockchain networks like Ethereum could be used to build a new generation of consumer applications.

The value created by traditional internet platforms (Facebook, Uber, etc.) was mostly captured by the giant companies and a few investors; the value generated by blockchain applications would be shared among early participants and ICO investors.

The article also envisioned building a decentralized Uber. In this system, early users and drivers would receive tokens for each ride, giving them ownership of the network and ensuring a fairer return of value to early co-builders.

The vision looked good on paper, but this decentralized revolution ultimately failed completely.

It was a crypto speculative feast replicating the 2001 internet bubble.

Ethereum became the most powerful fundraising platform in history, with over 3,000 ICO projects raising a total of $22 billion globally.

But, much like the internet bubble, the underlying technology was not mature enough to support the sky-high valuations the market was offering.

More critically, ICOs completely distorted the incentive structure between entrepreneurs and investors. Project teams could raise tens of millions of dollars overnight based on just an idea; investors were left holding only tokens, hoping for project delivery and value appreciation. Meanwhile, founding teams held large amounts of native tokens and could cash out and become wealthy immediately upon listing, completely losing the motivation to build real products.

In a bull market, founders and early investors made a fortune; in a bear market, ordinary retail investors were left holding the bag. Despite some well-intentioned builders, ICOs ultimately became a breeding ground for greed, hype, and fraud.

Throughout hundreds of years of financial history, every speculative bubble has been just like this.

Rebuilding from the Ruins: The Circle Hibernation Period of 2018-2019

As the market waned, leveraging the small reputation I had built on Reddit, I joined Circle in early 2018 for an entry-level marketing position.

At the time, Circle was four years old, with several consumer-facing products (investing, payments, exchange) that were unprofitable, but its over-the-counter (OTC) trading desk was quietly generating steady revenue, supporting the entire company's operations.

Over the next two years, the industry was mired in the depression following the ICO bubble burst. Most ICO projects were abandoned and became defunct; countless tokens went to zero, and industry sentiment hit rock bottom.

But it was during this darkest hour that the seeds for the industry's next renaissance were sown.

The industry's focus shifted away from consumer applications and towards rebuilding the traditional financial system on the internet.

Stablecoins pegged to the US dollar were initially created to facilitate traders moving in and out of crypto positions quickly. By maintaining a 1:1 reserve of US dollars and treasuries, the token price stays pegged to $1.

Tether's USDT rose rapidly during the ICO boom, with its dollar reserves largely held in bank accounts outside the US. Initially used mostly for trading, stablecoins soon benefited another group: people without access to the traditional banking system who wanted to hold US dollar assets.

Examples include people trying to circumvent capital controls, wealthy Chinese diversifying assets abroad, and citizens of Argentina and Turkey suffering from inflation.

In 2018, Circle, together with Coinbase, launched the regulated US dollar stablecoin USDC. Its early use was still predominantly for trading, but people began to envision this internet-native currency allowing anyone with an internet connection 24/7, permissionless access to US dollar assets.

Concurrently, the quality projects that survived the ICO era were mostly focused on finance. Ethereum was not just for fundraising; it could also rebuild the underlying infrastructure of financial markets: Uniswap for trading, Aave and Compound for lending formed the DeFi ecosystem.

Stablecoins and DeFi became deeply integrated, and a once-in-a-century global pandemic propelled them to their peak development.

The Return of the Internet's Wild West: The Messari Era of 2019-2021

At the end of 2019, I joined Messari, a data research startup with only 13 people, as its first full-time marketing hire.

The company had only 4 analysts, deeply researching the cutting edge of DeFi; at the time, the total market cap of DeFi was just $665 million.

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, bringing the global economy to a standstill and causing a crash in all asset classes.

To prevent an economic collapse, central banks worldwide initiated massive money printing, injecting a staggering $9 trillion into the economy during 2020 alone.

This vast amount of liquidity needed a destination. With everyone in lockdown, a torrent of hot money flowed into Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and various speculative assets.

Bitcoin surged from under $4,000 to nearly $70,000, breaking a trillion-dollar market cap with institutional capital support, outperforming macro assets like gold.

The loose monetary environment also gave birth to the famous "DeFi Summer." The market cap of DeFi protocols exploded by 250 times, reaching $180 billion.

Originally, DeFi was expected to reconstruct traditional finance, but "DeFi Summer" was more like a massive online game dominated by profit-seeking traders, with tens of billions of dollars in real capital entering the fray.

The core gameplay was yield farming. Anonymous developers launched new protocols one after another, with project names oddly clustering around various foods: YAM Finance, Spaghetti Money, SushiSwap. Traders could deposit mainstream tokens like ETH, USDC, and USDT to claim newly issued project tokens like YAM, SPAGHETTI, and SUSHI.

The scene was absurd and frantic: upon launch, these food-themed tokens born from nothing could reach market caps of over $1 billion within days. Early players cashed out at high prices, leaving the tokens to crash precipitously.

This was the literal Wild West of the internet.

Like the ICO craze before it, DeFi Summer created a host of new millionaires but ultimately succumbed to the bursting of a bubble. This wave also minted a new crypto billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, who would later become the central figure in the industry's next disaster.

The Peak of the Bubble: The Coinbase Era of 2021

In April 2021, shortly after Coinbase went public with a $100 billion valuation, I was invited to join their corporate development and venture capital team.

My work involved corporate mergers and acquisitions, evaluating early-stage crypto venture projects, writing industry trend analyses, and helping produce Coinbase's short-lived podcast. To this day, it remains one of the best teams I've ever been part of.

It was also during this period that another speculative bubble quietly took shape: the NFT craze, centered around digital artworks.

If DeFi was the playing field for professional traders, NFTs completely broke through to the public consciousness. They offered artists a new way to monetize online and laid the groundwork for establishing digital ownership of internet assets.

But, just like ICOs and DeFi Summer, NFT speculation quickly spiraled out of control. Digital collectibles like cartoon apes, punks, and penguins sold for as much as $1 million each. Artist Beeple's collage piece fetched an absurd $69 million at Christie's.

The crypto concept completely swept the mainstream: Larry David lampooned crypto skeptics in a Super Bowl ad; Sam Bankman-Fried's exchange FTX spent $135 million to secure the naming rights for the Miami Heat's arena. Everyone seemed to be getting rich from tokens, NFTs, or crypto-related stocks.

The mania of 2017 was back, amplified by unprecedented money printing, making this bubble four times larger in scale.

The Reckoning: The Great Industry Collapse of 2022

But soon, the party ended, and the industry plunged into collapse.

The same cheap money, money printing, and fiscal stimulus that had inflated the prices of all assets eventually led to consumer goods inflation. By the end of 2021, Bitcoin, Ethereum, the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500 all peaked simultaneously; runaway inflation was inevitable, forcing central banks to tighten policy—the very policy that had pushed stocks and crypto to all-time highs.

As interest rate hikes began and fiscal policy tightened across the board, investors re-evaluated the high-valuation assets in their portfolios: Is that cartoon ape really worth $1 million? Why does this sushi-themed token have a $3 billion market cap? And why is Dogecoin sustaining a $90 billion valuation?

Pessimism spread, triggering a cascading series of defaults in the industry.

If the ICO crash was analogous to the 2001 internet bubble burst, the 2022 downturn felt more like the 2008 global financial crisis: a small number of toxic assets combined with high leverage nearly brought down the entire industry.

The first domino to fall was Terra's algorithmic stablecoin, UST.

Stablecoins like USDC and USDT are backed by cash and Treasury bonds held in reserve. UST, however, relied on a complex algorithmic mechanism to maintain its $1 peg. The mechanism worked during stable markets but completely failed when a sell-off occurred.

Within days, $32 billion in market value evaporated, and countless holders saw their assets become worthless.

Hot on its heels, the multi-billion dollar hedge fund Three Arrows Capital declared bankruptcy due to its heavy bets on Terra and high leverage. Three Arrows Capital had borrowed heavily from crypto lending platforms like Celsius and Voyager. These platforms had misappropriated user crypto deposits in pursuit of seemingly safe 8% annual yields. After Three Arrows Capital collapsed, these lending platforms froze withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, wiping out the deposits of ordinary users.

During my time at Coinbase, we watched as FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried stepped in to rescue several distressed crypto lenders, including BlockFi. He was hailed as the "JP Morgan of crypto," the industry's white knight.

But the truth eventually emerged: SBF and FTX were the biggest risks of all.

Remember that expensive arena naming rights deal? That expenditure, and indeed SBF's entire business empire, was propped up by FTT, a token the exchange had created out of thin air. SBF used FTT as collateral for massive loans. When FTT's price crashed, the loans were liquidated, and FTX filed for bankruptcy.

More egregiously, FTX had secretly used customer funds for investments and to plug holes in its balance sheet. This once $32 billion behemoth collapsed within a week, with $8 billion in customer deposits vanishing.

SBF violated an iron rule of running an exchange: never touch user assets.

This was crypto's "Lehman Moment."

Gambling and the Casino: The Memecoin Carnival of 2023-2025

After FTX's collapse, SBF was sent to prison. In just 12 months, the crypto industry's market cap shrank from $3 trillion to less than $1 trillion.

Following that, the Biden administration launched a full-scale crackdown on the US crypto industry.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler sued most compliant crypto companies in the US for securities violations, sending enforcement notices to Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap, Robinhood, and others. The very companies that had operated within the rules for years became the SEC's primary targets.

Simultaneously, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressured traditional banks behind the scenes to cut ties with crypto clients, isolating crypto companies from the banking system and driving many teams overseas.

This regulatory approach led to several unintended consequences.

First, any crypto project with a business model (like DeFi protocols) was deemed an illegal security and faced the constant threat of a lawsuit. The legally safest option ironically became the Memecoin—a token with no real utility or clear vision, based purely on narrative.

Millions of Memecoins were launched on platforms like Pump.fun. Celebrities like Iggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner, and the Hawk Tuah girl launched their own Memecoins, which all ultimately descended into farce.

The crypto industry once again became a giant casino, on a scale far larger than before. Over 6 million different Memecoins were launched, with the sector's market cap peaking at $150 billion at the end of 2024, a bubble size surpassing even the NFT craze.

Institutionalization: The Crossmint Era of 2025-2026

Putting aside this industry sideshow, the crypto world's bet on Trump's election ultimately paid off.

As the likelihood of a Trump victory became clear, Bitcoin hit new all-time highs. The market's pricing logic was simple: the world's largest economy was shifting from hostile regulation to friendly support. Gary Gensler resigned; the new SEC dropped lawsuits against US crypto companies; traditional banks reopened business relationships with crypto firms.

Most importantly, in July 2025, the GENIUS Act was passed, the first comprehensive federal crypto legislation in the US, establishing clear regulatory guidelines for stablecoins.

Washington sent a clear signal to Wall Street: the crypto industry, especially stablecoins, was about to become a major commercial sector. Stablecoin companies like Bridge and BVNK were acquired by Stripe and Mastercard for over $1 billion valuations; Rain closed a nearly $2 billion Series C round; my former employer, Circle, the issuer of USDC, went public with a peak valuation of $60 billion in June 2025.

By then, I was Head of Marketing at Crossmint, where we partnered with MoneyGram to help this century-old cross-border remittance giant use stablecoins for global money transfers.

As the value of dollar tokenization became increasingly clear, Wall Street began to seriously explore tokenizing other assets on-chain.