Most crypto founders I know are now on their third pivot.

Those building NFT platforms in 2021 turned to DeFi yield products in 2022, pivoted again to AI agents in 2023/24, and today—they’re working on whatever the hottest narrative of the season is (prediction markets, perhaps).

They’re not wrong. In a sense, they’re playing the game correctly.
The problem is that the game itself makes building anything long-term structurally impossible.

Narrative emerges → capital floods in → everyone pivots → 6–9 months of building → narrative dies → pivot again.

In the ICO era, this cycle took 3–4 years. Then it shrank to 2 years. Now? If you’re lucky, it’s 18 months.

Crypto venture funding dropped nearly 60% in Q2 2025, further compressing the time and capital founders have before the next meta arrives.

But you can’t build anything meaningful in 18 months. Real infrastructure takes 3–5 years. True product-market fit (PMF) demands years of iteration—not just a few quarters.

Yet if you’re still building last year’s narrative, you’re already dead money. Investors stop calling. Users move on. Some VCs even push you to pivot to the next meta. Your team members start sending résumés to that newly funded project riding the latest hype wave.

Traditional wisdom says: avoid the sunk cost fallacy. If something doesn’t work, pivot.

Crypto has taken this idea to its extreme—“sunk cost maximization.”

No one stays on a single project long enough to find out if it could actually succeed. First sign of resistance: pivot. Growth slows: pivot. Fundraising gets tough: pivot.

Every founder does this calculation:

Option A — Keep building. Maybe it’ll succeed in 2–3 years, if luck holds and another round comes through.
Option B — Jump to the hot new narrative: raise immediately, show paper returns, and exit before anyone notices the cracks.

Most of the time, Option B wins.

Almost no crypto project ever actually finishes what it set out to build.

They’re perpetually “almost done.” Always one feature away from PMF.

But they never get there—because the narrative shifts mid-build. Your DeFi protocol is nearly ready? Too bad, everyone’s now building AI agents.

Markets punish finished products. A finished product’s limitations are visible. An “almost finished” one still has infinite potential.

Projects that actually get funded:

• Working products within a hot narrative — maybe $5M if lucky.

• Working products in old narratives — zero funding.

VCs don’t invest in products; they invest in attention.
And attention always flows toward new narratives, not finished ones.

Most teams today are doing pure narrative maxxing — optimizing the story itself, not the product.
Finishing a product limits your optionality. Leaving it open preserves your future exit routes.

Your best developer gets poached by a “hot narrative” startup offering 2x the salary.
Your marketing lead joins the latest overfunded hype project.

You can’t compete—because six months ago you pivoted away from that same narrative to “focus on shipping.”

No one wants to work on something stable but boring.
Everyone wants to join the chaotic, overfunded, high-risk project that might 10x before it implodes.

Crypto users use your product because it’s new, because everyone’s talking about it, or because there’s an airdrop.

Once the narrative shifts, they leave instantly.
It doesn’t matter if your product got better or you shipped all their requested features—attention has moved on.

You can’t build sustainable products for unstable users.

We all know founders who’ve pivoted so many times they’ve forgotten what they were originally building:
decentralized social → NFT marketplace → DeFi aggregator → gaming infra → AI agents → prediction markets.

Pivoting is no longer a strategy—it’s the business model.

The only crypto projects that truly endure were built when no one was paying attention.

Bitcoin was born in obscurity—no VC, no token sale.
Ethereum launched before ICO mania—no one knew what “smart contracts” would even become.

Most things built during the hype die with it.
Things built between cycles are the ones that survive.

But no one wants to build between cycles—there’s no funding, no attention, and no liquidity for exits.

Token incentives create liquid exit opportunities.
As long as founders and investors can exit before maturity, they will.

Information travels faster than construction.
By the time you finish building, everyone already knows the outcome.

Crypto’s core value proposition is speed.
To ask it to slow down and build patiently is to ask it not to be crypto at all.

If you spend three years building something, someone else can fork your idea, launch a worse-coded but better-marketed version in three months—and they’ll win.

Crypto struggles to build for the long term because it is structurally hostile to long-term thinking.

You can be the principled founder who refuses to pivot—sticking to your original vision for years, refining the product.
But the likely outcome: you go broke, fade into obscurity, and by the time you launch v1, those who pivoted three times have already replaced you.

The market doesn’t reward completion. It rewards starting over and over again.

Maybe crypto’s real innovation isn’t technological at all—it’s the discovery of how to extract maximum value from the least amount of completion.

Perhaps… the pivot itself is the product.

Most crypto founders I know are now on their third pivot.

Those building NFT platforms in 2021 turned to DeFi yield products in 2022, pivoted again to AI agents in 2023/24, and today—they’re working on whatever the hottest narrative of the season is (prediction markets, perhaps).

They’re not wrong. In a sense, they’re playing the game correctly.
The problem is that the game itself makes building anything long-term structurally impossible.

Narrative emerges → capital floods in → everyone pivots → 6–9 months of building → narrative dies → pivot again.

In the ICO era, this cycle took 3–4 years. Then it shrank to 2 years. Now? If you’re lucky, it’s 18 months.

Crypto venture funding dropped nearly 60% in Q2 2025, further compressing the time and capital founders have before the next meta arrives.

But you can’t build anything meaningful in 18 months. Real infrastructure takes 3–5 years. True product-market fit (PMF) demands years of iteration—not just a few quarters.

Yet if you’re still building last year’s narrative, you’re already dead money. Investors stop calling. Users move on. Some VCs even push you to pivot to the next meta. Your team members start sending résumés to that newly funded project riding the latest hype wave.

Traditional wisdom says: avoid the sunk cost fallacy. If something doesn’t work, pivot.

Crypto has taken this idea to its extreme—“sunk cost maximization.”

No one stays on a single project long enough to find out if it could actually succeed. First sign of resistance: pivot. Growth slows: pivot. Fundraising gets tough: pivot.

Every founder does this calculation:

Option A — Keep building. Maybe it’ll succeed in 2–3 years, if luck holds and another round comes through.
Option B — Jump to the hot new narrative: raise immediately, show paper returns, and exit before anyone notices the cracks.

Most of the time, Option B wins.

Almost no crypto project ever actually finishes what it set out to build.

They’re perpetually “almost done.” Always one feature away from PMF.

But they never get there—because the narrative shifts mid-build. Your DeFi protocol is nearly ready? Too bad, everyone’s now building AI agents.

Markets punish finished products. A finished product’s limitations are visible. An “almost finished” one still has infinite potential.

Projects that actually get funded:

• Working products within a hot narrative — maybe $5M if lucky.

• Working products in old narratives — zero funding.

VCs don’t invest in products; they invest in attention.
And attention always flows toward new narratives, not finished ones.

Most teams today are doing pure narrative maxxing — optimizing the story itself, not the product.
Finishing a product limits your optionality. Leaving it open preserves your future exit routes.

Your best developer gets poached by a “hot narrative” startup offering 2x the salary.
Your marketing lead joins the latest overfunded hype project.

You can’t compete—because six months ago you pivoted away from that same narrative to “focus on shipping.”

No one wants to work on something stable but boring.
Everyone wants to join the chaotic, overfunded, high-risk project that might 10x before it implodes.

Crypto users use your product because it’s new, because everyone’s talking about it, or because there’s an airdrop.

Once the narrative shifts, they leave instantly.
It doesn’t matter if your product got better or you shipped all their requested features—attention has moved on.

You can’t build sustainable products for unstable users.

We all know founders who’ve pivoted so many times they’ve forgotten what they were originally building:
decentralized social → NFT marketplace → DeFi aggregator → gaming infra → AI agents → prediction markets.

Pivoting is no longer a strategy—it’s the business model.

The only crypto projects that truly endure were built when no one was paying attention.

Bitcoin was born in obscurity—no VC, no token sale.
Ethereum launched before ICO mania—no one knew what “smart contracts” would even become.

Most things built during the hype die with it.
Things built between cycles are the ones that survive.

But no one wants to build between cycles—there’s no funding, no attention, and no liquidity for exits.

Token incentives create liquid exit opportunities.
As long as founders and investors can exit before maturity, they will.

Information travels faster than construction.
By the time you finish building, everyone already knows the outcome.

Crypto’s core value proposition is speed.
To ask it to slow down and build patiently is to ask it not to be crypto at all.

If you spend three years building something, someone else can fork your idea, launch a worse-coded but better-marketed version in three months—and they’ll win.

Crypto struggles to build for the long term because it is structurally hostile to long-term thinking.

You can be the principled founder who refuses to pivot—sticking to your original vision for years, refining the product.
But the likely outcome: you go broke, fade into obscurity, and by the time you launch v1, those who pivoted three times have already replaced you.

The market doesn’t reward completion. It rewards starting over and over again.

Maybe crypto’s real innovation isn’t technological at all—it’s the discovery of how to extract maximum value from the least amount of completion.

Perhaps… the pivot itself is the product.