Opinion
|6 min ReadWhen Tradition Salutes Crypto, drop the pessimism
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
The pendulum swung too far to doom
Crypto Twitter got crowded with gloomy natives. They talk fraud, poor token designs, slow governance, weak builders. Some of that is true. But the mood turned into a doomsday chorus. The real issue is simpler. It is getting harder to beat the market. People hate that feeling. They call it stagnation. They miss the point. This asset class changes incentives. It widens access. It is messy by design. And it is still early.
We all see the problems. Tokenomics often skewed. Noise from low quality projects. Scams grabbing headlines. Only a small slice of protocols feel real. Few tokens deserve long-term capital. Governance works slowly. Regulation remains unclear. The tools that make asset creation easy also make grifts easy. History even rewarded bad actors at times. These are solvable. They are byproducts of an open system still learning to walk.
Now look at what already works. We have products moving toward product-market fit. Not thousands. Enough to matter. Each cycle lifts the floor. Better infra. Better know-how. The compounding is real.
Remember how the early internet looked
Critics say today’s wins are small. They forget how the web began. Go look at those clunky dot-com homepages. Ugly. Slow. Confusing. Yet they were the seeds. The web we love grew from that.
A lot of public internet companies still failed after the bubble burst. Amazon dropped more than 90 percent in two years, from 7, and only fully recovered by 2010. Many others vanished. Thousands never even reached public markets and still burned venture money.
Yet the jewels emerged. Amazon, Netflix, PayPal, Google, and later Meta. A classic power law. Most die. A few define an era. Expect the same in AI. Expect the same in crypto. In 2020, for example, Israel had a fresh pack of ambitious AI startups. Many will not last. A handful will lead.
Crypto made everyone a venture investor
Why does failure feel sharper here? Because tokens put a ticker on every experiment. Anyone can launch. Anyone can buy. Due diligence often skipped. Supply of “investable” projects exploded. Retail lived the hard math of venture returns in public. If every dot-com founder had run an ICO for a half-working idea, then listed instantly and pumped it on a meme tool, we would have seen the same. Of course many tokens will drop 90 percent. That is what a wide, permissionless frontier looks like.
So, what did we actually build? Bitcoin grew into a $2 trillion asset in about 16 years, starting from an anonymous white paper. In a decade of smart-contract platforms, we built a peer-to-peer internet that can safeguard hundreds of billions even through shock. We built faster chains that let anyone create assets with a click and support billions in daily DEX spot volume. We put dollars on chain and made global transfers cheap and instant. We moved lending and yield primitives on chain. We run transparent, borderless derivatives venues that can rival Robinhood volumes while sending most revenue back to token holders. We re-shaped market structure with new ways to go long, short, and hedge, and with new asset types like perpetuals and prediction markets. We turned JPEGs into scarce digital property. We created internet communities that priced jokes at public-company levels. We invented new capital formation like ICOs and bonding curves. We keep pushing privacy for money itself.
We built an alternative for anyone with an internet connection. It is younger, freer, more open, more fun. Markets keep offering chances to buy greatness at low prices. The job is to separate signal from noise.
The long view beats linear expectations
At Syncracy, we believe crypto’s FAANG is already forming, with new contenders every year or two. People expect steady progress each year, then get upset when the curve stalls. Technology compounds. It jumps.
“Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.” — Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near
The dot-com bust took about 15 years to heal on the charts.
Then the run changed the world.
Today the old guard, Wall Street, even parts of government, are paying attention to crypto with respect. That is historic. Some early users are losing faith at the exact moment the establishment leans in. I reject that. Bitcoin is still digital gold. We are still building new financial primitives. We are still making the world more open and interesting. For disciplined investors, there are still chances to outperform. Stay constructive. Pick well. Let compounding work. And when tradition shows respect, drop the pessimism.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.