https://x.com/derivatives_ape/status/1936789808942051406

I read this post with a dose of sadness and at the same time a dose of lethal desire to smash it to pieces just because everything about it just made me so mad. I went as far as creating a personal Mirror XYZ page so I could respond in a long and thoughtful way like I couldn’t do on twitter/X.

I also want to put it on the blockchain, so it can act as permanently engraved conviction that can be referred to at any point of time in the future.

This is how much I do not agree with this opinion. Alright, let’s start.

“Crypto Is Dead” — The same tired eulogy that gets proven wrong every cycle.

Cool story, here’s a list of times people said the same thing:

• 2011 Mt. Gox hack, BTC crashes 94% → 2013 bull run, BTC to $1,100

• 2014 Silk Road takedown, BTC to $160 → 2017 ICO boom, ETH rises 10,000%

• 2018 ICO crash, ETH to $80, “no one’s building” → 2020–2021 DeFi/NFT explosion

• 2022 FTX, Luna, 3AC, its truly over. What an industry embarassment. No institution will ever take us seriously → 2024: BTC hits ATH, literally all institutions enter.

The “crypto is dead” trope is older than most people's Metamask wallets. And every time, it’s a near bottom signal. Not because hopium saves it -- but because what dies is the grift, and what emerges is product-market fit.

“There Are No New Buyers” -- False. Here’s what’s actually happening:

• BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan are all entering.

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs just saw billions in net inflows in Q2 2025.

• RWA tokenization is ramping up: on-chain treasuries, equities, yield-bearing stablecoins.

• Latin America and Southeast Asia are seeing crypto adoption in payments, remittances, and stablecoin use at record levels.

You don’t see new buyers because they’re not on Twitter. They’re institutions, sovereigns, and retail in places where fiat is melting.

“We’re Just Trading a Corpse” -- Just like the internet in 2002?

I’m actually old enough to have been around the dot.com boom at the beginning of the century. This is not an age or “I’m older therefore wiser” flex, just saying.

This whole rant is basically a dot-com bust cope:

• Pets.com, Webvan, eToys collapse in 2001 → “Internet is dead”

• 90% of internet stocks go to zero

• 2002: “There’s no use case for this tech”

• 2024: Amazon is $2T. Google runs your life. Shopify enables millions of businesses, mastering IT infra, e-commerce, generic infobank and payments respectively.

By 2020, those “corpse traders” were running the global economy.

Crypto in 2025 is at that same inflection point:

• Ethereum isn’t dead -- it’s mid-upgrade. So much is being shipped live. And even if Ethereum ends up being the “My Space” of Crypto, believe me, the “Facebook of Crypto” that follows will reveal itself soon, if it hasn’t already. It could be Sui, it could be Hyperliquid, it could be something else.

• Solana isn’t vapor -- it's hitting millions of users monthly through mass consumer apps. Pumpfun is just an early iteration of whats possible.

• Chain abstraction, intent-based UX, and walletless onboarding are finally happening -- the friction that killed retail is being removed

You’re not witnessing a death. You’re witnessing a quiet, deep infrastructure phase. Just like cloud and mobile before it. A phase where speculation levels you’re used to aren’t at the foreground.

“Nobody Believes Anymore” -- Wrong. The tourists left. The builders stayed.

The market lost gamblers, not conviction. And that’s a good thing.

This space will reward those who think in decades, not cycles. The same way early internet and mobile did. You’re saying crypto is dead the exact moment real PMF is emerging:

• Stablecoins are now the fourth largest form of dollar in circulation globally. In countries like Nigeria, Argentina, Phillipines, Turkey they are literally how people eat and survive. And in some of these countries, stablecoin-based remittances surpass traditional rails in volume

• Tokenized assets are bringing $100m+/day in tradfi volume on-chain.

• Countries are passing regulatory frameworks, not bans.

“Conviction” isn’t a vibe anymore — it’s execution.

“No One Believes Anymore” -- Belief isn’t the benchmark. Progress Is.

Loss of hype ≠ loss of trajectory. In every past technological or financial revolution, there was a long, quiet phase where enthusiasm faded -- right before mass adoption scaled.

Take a few examples beyond crypto:

• Railroads, late 1800s: After a boom in speculative investment (many frauds included), there was a wipeout. Rail stocks collapsed. But in the years that followed, rail infrastructure became the backbone of global commerce, shipping and trade routes.

• Telecom in the early 1900s: Speculative bubbles around radio and telephone companies burst, but the groundwork laid then enabled the eventual birth of telco conglomerates and modern global communication.

• Emerging Markets, 1980s–1990s: Many EMs were dismissed as “uninvestable” after crises (don’t have to go far outside of 90’s China and Russia for example). But reforms followed, and by the 2000s, emerging markets were driving global GDP growth, forming the core of BRICS.

• China tech, early 2000s: Post-WTO entry, there was epic western skepticism. But platforms like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu slowly emerged as dominant, even while early-stage internet scams flared and failed.

It’s the same S-curve pattern, every time: Irrational exuberance → Disillusionment → Infrastructure consolidation → Mass adoption. We are in that third phase now with crypto.

“It’s Just Extractive Gambling” — So were early capital markets. Until they weren’t.

Look into early U.S. equity markets in the 1800s, or nascent bond markets in Europe centuries ago. Markets begin messy. Grift, hype, and malinvestment are features of early stage growth -- not bugs. Over time it shifts:

• Market structure matures (custody, ETFs, compliance)

• Speculation gives way to productive capital allocation

• Regulation catches up, enabling larger pools of institutional capital

• The junk bond market in the 80’s: Once considered predatory, now a key part of global financing

• Venture capital post-dot-com: Went from “bubble” to founding Amazon, Google, Facebook, Stripe as well as evolution of Microsoft and Apple.

“There Are No New Buyers” -- Awareness ≠ Adoption, and retail always returns.

The idea that crypto has "reached all humans" and there are no more pigs to slaughter left is a common fallacy. Knowing about something and participating meaningfully in it are two very different things. Retail isn’t absent because it’s finished. Retail is absent because this isn’t their moment. Yet.

We can dive into actual data and reasons to break it down:

Global Awareness Is High -- But Actual Participation Is Low

According to a 2024 survey by KuCoin and Statista:

• Only ~6–7% of the global population owns crypto in any meaningful way.

• Even in the U.S, despite a decade of exposure, less than 20% of the population has ever held any crypto.

• In emerging markets, ownership rates are still in the single digits, with high latent demand as fiat currencies continue to erode.

Awareness ≠ saturation. If awareness alone created full market participation, every person who heard of the internet in 1996 would’ve bought Amazon or a Google stock. But most didn’t.

Retail Returns in Waves — Always Has, Always Will

Retail follows narratives and momentum, not fundamentals. That’s just how market psychology works. Historically, retail pulls back during downturns, not because they’re “done” but because:

• There’s nothing to FOMO into

• The macro backdrop is tight (more on that in a second)

• Risk appetite is temporarily gone

But the second something speculative hits the cultural zeitgeist again -- a killer app, a new asset class, or a new on-chain trend -- they come back. Every time. Retail largely ignored tech after dot-com crash → re-entered during the iPhone/Google/Facebook boom. Retail abandoned crypto after the ICO collapse → returned en masse with DeFi, NFTs, dog coins, etc. Retail is cyclical, not static.

Current Macro Conditions Don’t Support Retail Participation — And That’s Exactly Why This Isn’t the Top

We’re in a phase of the economic cycle where most people are:

• Struggling with inflation and cost of living

• Experiencing wage stagnation, job losses, and rising personal debt

• Lacking the excess liquidity that drove the 2020–2021 retail boom (stimulus checks, lockdown savings, asset bubbles)

So yes -- retail isn’t buying risk assets (or for the sake of this particular debate - altcoins or NFTs or whatever) at scale right now. That’s precisely why valuations are down only and yet to find the bottom, but eventually will.

It’s not that they’re “done with crypto.” It’s that they don’t have the capital, and they don’t have the spark to reignite speculative interest. But that spark always comes -- via narrative, innovation, macro policy shifts, or some combination.

The Next Onboarding Phase Will Look Different — But It Will Come

Next time retail comes back, it may not be through centralized exchanges and memecoins. It could be:

• Apps with walletless onboarding and fiat UX

• Yield-bearing stablecoins offered through fintech platforms

• Gamefi/socialfi mechanisms embedded in apps AND not labeled “crypto”

Most people didn’t know they were using AWS when they streamed Netflix. Likewise, the next retail cycle might onboard millions of users without them even knowing it’s crypto. And the assets of those technologies will benefit greatly from appreciation as a result, causing the traders and speculators feel alive like they did in 2017 or 2021 again. This moment is literally inevitable, but you are being squeezed for your last bit of belief and patience because of the most ferocious and ruthless element of the markets:

- TIME.

Retail isn’t gone. It’s waiting — on better conditions, new narratives, and more accessible tools. Saying “everyone already knows about crypto” is like saying “everyone already knows about the internet” in 2004. True in a shallow sense. Mass awareness precedes mass participation. And when conditions shift -- they will -- the same psychology that drove past manias will show up again. Just like it always has.

My conclusion to all of this is as follows:

Nothing has topped out in 2021. Thats just the price. The tech curve certainly hasn’t. If your entire view is based on price highs, you’ll miss the actual value curve which eventually causes new price highs. Its a mid-phase buildout of an S-curve. Nothing more, nothing less.

You’re not wrong about the noise -- just the signal. Yes, the speculative mania has died down. Yes, most people aren’t getting rich quick anymore. But that doesn’t mean crypto is dead. It means the casino lights are off in a casino that actually has closing and opening hours.

Every major technological and financial revolution -- from railroads to the internet to mobile -- went through this exact sequence. And when the adoption happened, the underlying assets representing the adoption leading businesses skyrocketed, causing a new wave of speculation and believe it or not, LONG TERM INVESTMENTS!

If anything, what this cycle has done is taught every single one of you one thing:

HODL = HARAM.

Now that you’re used to it, it will eventually become very painful when alt risk assets representing real mass consumption/PMF actually start rising for very long periods of time (a la Amazon in the 2000’s) and most of you will sell every resistance thinking a jeet sits just around the corner waiting to nuke your bag along with his.

No jeet will ever survive real buy pressure. In any speculative market, especially a matured market. Crypto isn’t an exception. It's just graduating and setting up for the masses to miss out on generational gains, AGAIN!

-- signing off,

TogonXBT, June 23rd, 2025