Sterling
726 posts
Crypto easy money era has ended. Historically, most easy money periods last 3-7 years: - California Gold Rush lasted 7 years. - Tulip mania lasted 3 - The dot-com bubble about 5 years before the Nasdaq dumped by 78% - Japan's bubble was 6 years, then Nikkei took 34 years to recover So most speculative booms in history last 3-7 years. Crypto easy money started in 2017 with ICOs. Then DeFi summer 2020. NFTs in 2021. Airdrops. Points farming. Memecoins. That's ~8 years of easy money. We are already past that as every easy money model has been discovered, exploited, or arbitraged to max competition. Philosophical hard-forks like BTC -> BTC Gold or ETH -> ETH classic are over as crypto ossified not just technically. ICOs got regulated. Airdrops get farmed by industrialized sybils. Memecoin launches went from community fun projects to extraction tools. The gold rush analogy seems quite good here as FOMOs end the same way: Surface deposits get exhausted and then industrial mining takes over. (Literally same happened to BTC mining moving from retail to institutions who even IPOed from BTC mining.) So here’s where crypto is now: TradFi suits moving in, tokenization, RWAs, corpo-sloppo permissioned chains, and regulation. The Trump family & insiders are the last to get easy money from crypto. For retail, the surface easy money gold picking is gone. What's left to earn requires real infra, real users, real revenue which means more specialization, specific knowledge and REAL hard effort. Not sure how many of us who got easy money are ready to grind harder now. So many builders, KOLs, projects are extracting as much as they (we) can before leaving crypto coz adapting to the new hard-money period is gonna be hard. Question is: where to pivot for easy money? Asking for a friend.
