I used to think crypto was the fastest horse and the most asymmetric asset class you could allocate to. After five years of trading through narrative rotations, blow-ups, hacks, and endless cycles of manufactured exit liquidity, I don’t believe that anymore. If you have cash on the sidelines, I wouldn’t recommend allocating the majority of it to crypto. There are maybe <10 actually investable tokens in this entire industry. The rest are zero-sum, overvalued, extractive hype machines with no staying power. Everyone knows they have no staying power, but they still join the crowd and meme things up so they can sell to a greater fool. 99% of crypto twitter's sentiment volatility comes from people not understanding what they own and to be fair, with most tokens (especially L1s), nobody even knows how to value them. Right now for me, the only real reason to trade crypto is to capitalize on short emotional dislocations like when Plasma got shilled as Tether beta. This was picking off desperate, less sophisticated participants. For the last few years, everything in crypto traded at a premium to fair value simply because it was crypto. That premium is gone. Without real structural change or equity like protections, I think the pendulum swings the other way and tokens start trading at a discount purely because of the association with crypto. Retail will still chase the “fastest horse” to escape the rat race. I just don’t think crypto is that vehicle anymore. The last few months in equities proved stocks can behave like alts too… except their “alts” are backed by actual businesses. The AI x crypto meta is the perfect example: not one project had staying power. Meanwhile, AI equities have been melting faces. Even memecoin traders migrated to perps, got blown out on 10/10, and now with equity perps emerging, they’ll probably move there next. At least the underlying company is legit. It feels like almost everyone in crypto is a speculator, not an investor. That’s the sad part. The underlying tech has the potential to create real, lasting change, but the space has mostly attracted the most extractive, short-term actors. The only way forward is a full reset where the dead weight gets cleared out and only the teams building real, durable applications survive.