quote: .@CoinDesk just published an important article that I am QTing. I hope you read it. I am, by crypto standards, a geriatric. I have had the privilege & pain of seeing a few cycles before this one. I started my career at WIRED in 2002, on the heels of the .com bust. I took on my first leadership role there in 2008, as the global financial crisis unfolded. Neither period was easy. There is nothing fun or funny about moments like these. Companies fail, people lose jobs, careers change & confidence gets shaken. If you have never experienced a downturn, it is easy to question yourself. But the most important question to ask is: Why are you here? When capital is abundant, prices are rising & everyone feels like a genius, almost any answer will do. When conditions get hard, your answer needs to be much better. According to @CoinDesk, more than 100 crypto projects have shut down, filed for bankruptcy or gone permanently dark in 2026. The shakeout is real & painful. When I arrived at WIRED in 2002, the wreckage of the .com bust was everywhere. The crash did not prove the Internet was a bad idea. It proved that being an Internet company was not, by itself, a business model. Thousands of companies disappeared. The Internet did not. The lesson is important: A collapsing market and a failing technology are not the same thing. History does not guarantee crypto will follow the same path. The technology still has to prove its value through products people actually use. But crypto is approaching that test. The question is no longer whether you can launch a token, create another chain, raise a large round or generate attention. It is simpler: Are you creating something people actually need? My conviction in crypto comes from a broader view of where technology is taking the world: Smarter. Faster. Cheaper. I believe two technologies will be enormously important to that transformation: AI & crypto. @johnjdagostino has a framework I love: AI is scalable intelligence, while crypto provides scalable truth. AI can reduce the cost of creating & acting on information. Blockchains can reduce the cost of establishing & verifying ownership, authenticity & settlement. Different technologies with different purposes but increasingly important capabilities in a digital world. That is where tokenization becomes interesting. As more of the world becomes digital, more money, assets, ownership & economic activity can become digitally native too. But putting something on a blockchain does not make it valuable. Tokenization matters only when it makes something meaningfully better. Transformative technologies eventually have to graduate from what is possible to what is useful; and useful has a simple definition: Someone wants what you are building. The best teams know what they are building, who they are building it for & the value they create. Then they execute relentlessly. And, when conditions get difficult, one quality becomes disproportionately important: Grit. The best teams I know are in the trenches right now fighting for every inch because they believe what they are building matters. And, there are moments when everyone, especially leaders, must be willing to give more. This is one of them. That does not mean glorifying burnout or treating people as expendable. It means recognizing that difficult moments require difficult choices, sharper priorities & is not 9-5. Survival becomes the prerequisite for everything else. Bull markets can obscure the answers whereas Bear markets reveal them. That is why this moment, painful as it is, also represents an extraordinary opportunity. 25 years ago, the .com bust looked like the end of the Internet economy. It was not. What followed changed the world. Today, crypto faces its own test. Putting something on a blockchain does not make it valuable. The technology has to earn its place. And, so do we. So ask yourself: Why are you here? If you have a good answer, get back to work. | Crypto is going through a massive dot-com style shakeout as over 100 projects fold in 2026. @OKnightCrypto reports. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/08/09/crypto-is-going-through-a-massive-dot-com-style-shakeout-as-over-100-projects-fold-in-2026

quote: .@CoinDesk just published an important article that I am QTing. I hope you read it. I am, by crypto standards, a geriatric. I have had the privilege & pain of seeing a few cycles before this one. I started my career at WIRED in 2002, on the heels of the .com bust. I took on my first leadership role there in 2008, as the global financial crisis unfolded. Neither period was easy. There is nothing fun or funny about moments like these. Companies fail, people lose jobs, careers change & confidence gets shaken. If you have never experienced a downturn, it is easy to question yourself. But the most important question to ask is: Why are you here? When capital is abundant, prices are rising & everyone feels like a genius, almost any answer will do. When conditions get hard, your answer needs to be much better. According to @CoinDesk, more than 100 crypto projects have shut down, filed for bankruptcy or gone permanently dark in 2026. The shakeout is real & painful. When I arrived at WIRED in 2002, the wreckage of the .com bust was everywhere. The crash did not prove the Internet was a bad idea. It proved that being an Internet company was not, by itself, a business model. Thousands of companies disappeared. The Internet did not. The lesson is important: A collapsing market and a failing technology are not the same thing. History does not guarantee crypto will follow the same path. The technology still has to prove its value through products people actually use. But crypto is approaching that test. The question is no longer whether you can launch a token, create another chain, raise a large round or generate attention. It is simpler: Are you creating something people actually need? My conviction in crypto comes from a broader view of where technology is taking the world: Smarter. Faster. Cheaper. I believe two technologies will be enormously important to that transformation: AI & crypto. @johnjdagostino has a framework I love: AI is scalable intelligence, while crypto provides scalable truth. AI can reduce the cost of creating & acting on information. Blockchains can reduce the cost of establishing & verifying ownership, authenticity & settlement. Different technologies with different purposes but increasingly important capabilities in a digital world. That is where tokenization becomes interesting. As more of the world becomes digital, more money, assets, ownership & economic activity can become digitally native too. But putting something on a blockchain does not make it valuable. Tokenization matters only when it makes something meaningfully better. Transformative technologies eventually have to graduate from what is possible to what is useful; and useful has a simple definition: Someone wants what you are building. The best teams know what they are building, who they are building it for & the value they create. Then they execute relentlessly. And, when conditions get difficult, one quality becomes disproportionately important: Grit. The best teams I know are in the trenches right now fighting for every inch because they believe what they are building matters. And, there are moments when everyone, especially leaders, must be willing to give more. This is one of them. That does not mean glorifying burnout or treating people as expendable. It means recognizing that difficult moments require difficult choices, sharper priorities & is not 9-5. Survival becomes the prerequisite for everything else. Bull markets can obscure the answers whereas Bear markets reveal them. That is why this moment, painful as it is, also represents an extraordinary opportunity. 25 years ago, the .com bust looked like the end of the Internet economy. It was not. What followed changed the world. Today, crypto faces its own test. Putting something on a blockchain does not make it valuable. The technology has to earn its place. And, so do we. So ask yourself: Why are you here? If you have a good answer, get back to work. | Crypto is going through a massive dot-com style shakeout as over 100 projects fold in 2026. @OKnightCrypto reports. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/08/09/crypto-is-going-through-a-massive-dot-com-style-shakeout-as-over-100-projects-fold-in-2026

Source:https://x.com/CoinDesk/status/2086611269096730905