Why Crypto Believers Hold Their Ground: Beyond the Burnout

The crypto industry is experiencing a crisis of faith. Recent confessions from prominent figures like Aevo co-founder Ken Chan have articulated what many practitioners silently feel: a profound sense of exhaustion after years devoted to blockchain technology and digital assets. Yet beneath this weariness lies a more critical question—what exactly is worth believing in when everything feels temporary and speculative?

Industry Fatigue and the Real Question

Those immersed in crypto for years have witnessed an evolution that strains conviction. The journey from romantic idealism about on-chain governance to today’s landscape of meme tokens and perpetual contracts leaves many wondering: are we genuinely participating in a technological revolution, or simply feeding an endless speculation machine?

The root of this doubt isn’t weakness of character—it’s structural. In crypto, narratives collapse faster than products are built. Hype consistently outweighs substance. Speculation races ahead of actual construction. The cycles are relentless: staying awake for airdrops, monitoring launches, chasing the next big narrative, researching protocols through the night, participating in governance with uncompensated effort. The treadmill never stops.

Ken Chan’s public admission resonated because it articulated a collective truth: many projects eventually disappear without meaningful failure, simply vanishing from memory. This reality forces a reckoning: What are we actually holding onto?

What We Actually Believe In

The honest answer separates wheat from chaff. We’re not believing in individual project teams—they pivot, exit, or abandon their work. We’re not following particular KOLs, whose influence is often ephemeral. We’re not betting on specific narratives, which have shelf lives measured in months.

What remains, according to Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures, is belief in something more fundamental: crypto’s potential to reshape how the world operates financially. This includes five transformative possibilities: establishing more resilient monetary systems, encoding business logic through smart contracts, creating verifiable digital ownership, enhancing capital market efficiency, and extending financial access globally.

This distinction matters. When you strip away the noise, the conviction that endures is about significance—the idea that cryptocurrency addresses genuine problems that matter at civilization scale.

The Monetary System Revolution

Return to Bitcoin’s foundational premise: “A peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” When Satoshi Nakamoto proposed this during the 2008 financial crisis, the world’s monetary infrastructure had just catastrophically failed. Lehman Brothers collapsed. Central institutions proved untrustworthy. The question Bitcoin answered was radical: could humanity create money that requires faith in no single authority?

For the first time in history, a currency exists that isn’t controlled by any nation, company, or individual. Unlike traditional financial institutions that can freeze your account tomorrow, no centralized power can prevent you from transacting Bitcoin tomorrow. This isn’t philosophical abstraction—it’s a fundamental shift in what ownership means.

Real-World Impact: When Currencies Depreciate

The theoretical becomes practical in countries experiencing economic collapse. In Argentina, Turkey, and Venezuela, cryptocurrencies have become survival infrastructure. When a national currency begins to depreciate in purchasing power perpetually, stablecoins like USDT offer an alternative that maintains stability. Argentine traders recognize this reality so clearly that stablecoins comprise 61.8% of the country’s crypto trading volume.

For freelancers, digital nomads, and entrepreneurs with international operations, USDT functions as a practical digital dollar. Converting pesos to USDT through a single click beats hiding dollars under mattresses or risking currency black-market exchanges. Whether street vendors conducting cash trades or elite businesses transferring USDT, both actions express the same economic truth: distrust in government currency and preference for independent value preservation.

In high-inflation environments where currencies persistently depreciate and welfare systems crumble, every crypto transaction represents a quiet rebellion against institutional erosion of purchasing power. Over a century, Argentina’s peso has been devalued repeatedly while administrations changed hands. Through gray-market wisdom and decentralized alternatives, common citizens have found pathways that formal systems denied them.

Learning from Internet’s Messy Foundation

The crypto industry’s chaotic present mirrors the internet’s turbulent past. In 2000, the NASDAQ collapsed 78%. Amazon faced dismissal as merely a bookstore. Google was considered inferior to Yahoo. Early social networks were written off as teenage rebellion.

That era spawned thousands of dead startups, countless vanished innovations, massive wasted investments, and millions who felt they’d squandered their youth. Early BBS networks, portal sites, dial-up infrastructure, and paid email services have almost entirely disappeared. Ninety percent of first-generation mobile internet products failed to survive.

Yet calling this a waste fundamentally misunderstands technological development. Those forgotten systems created the soil from which modern internet emerged. Their infrastructure—browsers, TCP/IP protocols, early servers, compilers—became the foundation enabling Facebook, Google, Apple, cloud computing, and eventually AI.

Social networks follow identical patterns. Each generation replaces the previous one, yet none was futile. TikTok itself is composed of countless dead social networks compressed into a single platform. No foundational technology industry has followed a clean, linear, obviously correct path. All essential infrastructure technologies experienced identical phases: chaos, bubbles, trial-and-error, widespread misunderstanding—before changing the world.

Crypto currently occupies this chaotic intermediate phase. Even if Ethereum is superseded by alternative chains, Layer 2 solutions are rebuilt with new architectures, and today’s DEXs completely disappear, nothing is wasted. What’s provided instead is foundational soil, experimental parameters, social discovery, path dependencies, and essential samples that future generations will absorb and improve upon.

We Are Not Alone in This Journey

Whether you feel exhausted or energized by this industry, recognize: you don’t persist in isolation. Millions of developers, researchers, fund managers, node operators, and builders worldwide are incrementally advancing this transformation. Major capital allocators—nearly all top 20 global funds have established Web3 divisions—continue deploying resources. Traditional finance institutions (BlackRock, Fidelity, CME) keep entering the space. National governments reference Bitcoin when designing digital currencies. Digital asset ETFs across the United States break inflow records repeatedly. In merely fifteen years, Bitcoin ascended into the world’s top ten financial assets despite persistent skepticism.

Yes, the industry contains bubbles, speculation, chaos, and fraud. Simultaneously, undeniable transformations have already occurred. These changes have genuinely altered global financial architecture.

We stand within an industry destined to continue reshaping how humanity transacts, stores value, and trusts systems. That’s not delusion—it’s documented reality unfolding in real time.

Even if everything you believed will eventually depreciate in novelty or be replaced by superior technologies, the groundwork you help establish remains. For those still walking this path despite the fatigue: you’re not wasting anything. You’re building the infrastructure that future generations will inherit and transcend.