Thoughts on crypto 2025

I am writing this article for a dear friend who is thinking about investing in Bitcoin and Ethereum and asked for my opinion on crypto in general. There are many ways to view cryptocurrencies: a technology, an investment, a cultural movement etc. I will focus on the technological aspect for now.

I refer to this post by Martin Skhreli where he says:

there’s just not that much to develop… cryptographic protocols are only so useful. the low hanging fruit (payments) has been pruned… the force-fitting of the last 5 years (NFTs, RWA, ZK, xFi etc.) has proven cringe. it’s like working on networking software, compression or file system primitives in 2025. no one is doing it because the important part is over.

While the cryptocurrency ecosystem has been successful in creating somewhat functional parallel economy, it remains niche and irrelevant to most people’s lives. I consider adoption as a proxy to gauge usefulness.

A common rebuttal by proponents of crypto is that it just takes more time for the technology to catch on. I would argue that the more valuable a techonology is the faster it is adopted. Take chatGPT for example, it was the fastest app in history to 100 million users.

When crypto is taken into context with other technolgies like AI (specifically LLMs) where adoption has been at breakneck speed, the demand is so insatiable that we have begun to look at alternative sources of power and where the application of the technology is already shifting the workflow of the average office worker, crypto hasn’t really affected the world in a meaningful way even though the bitcoin white paper has been around twice as long as the transformer paper (2008 and 2017, respectively).

There was a recent interview by Satya Nadella on the Dwarkesh podcast where he dispells the notion of AGI by calling it “benchmark hacking” and that the only real benchmark is whether AI can grow global GDP by 10%. I would argue that actually affecting the bottom line of an economy is a decent measure of success of a technology and crypto has come nowhere near that whereas other techonologies already have in shorter timeframes.