Haseeb ＞|＜@hosseeb
There's an obvious answer here that everyone's dancing around:
Crypto is simply harder now.
Not because it was all a scam or funny money or whatever.
Crypto is harder because it's winning, and there are way more mature companies and products at scale today. This makes incumbents harder to unseat. Coinbase, Binance, Solana, Base, Polymarket, Circle, Tether--they're all bigger and better and more entrenched than they were even just a few years ago.
This is a natural thing that happens with industries. In the early Internet, it was a lot easier to build a social network. Very hard after 2015. A couple years ago, there was room to attack the big AI labs, now it's almost impossible to get any distribution at all.
That doesn't mean there's no room for startups. But it does mean the land grab phase is over. During the land grab, almost anyone can win given the right timing. But we're in the midgame now, and most of the board is already occupied. At this stage, you'll have to attack someone powerful to take over some land, not just plant a flag in an empty field.
There are still a few greenfield areas, and there's always room for people who can genuinely innovate. But crypto is harder now, and that means the ideas need to be sharper, the teams need to be stronger, and the bar is rightfully higher than a few years ago.
