Here's a take that might annoy crypto Twitter: the technology isn't dying, it's just losing its identity as a standalone culture. And according to one venture capitalist, that's exactly what success looks like.
Venture capitalist Dougie DeLuca made the case in a recent post on X that crypto has become a closed loop engineered for insiders. Airdrops and points programs kept recycling the same wallets, generating noise but little substance. The result? Something resembling a liquid casino or massively multiplayer online game—fun for participants, occasionally profitable, but fundamentally limited in scope.
The Playbook Is Broken
DeLuca's argument is that crypto won't vanish, it will dissolve. The boundaries separating crypto from fintech, payments, AI infrastructure, and traditional markets are already blurring. Soon, "crypto startup" stops being a meaningful category as mainstream builders adopt blockchain rails without adopting crypto culture.
Meanwhile, many crypto-native applications are stagnating while real adoption happens quietly in places nobody's watching.
The old playbook isn't working anymore. Incentive-driven growth creates temporary spikes, not durable user bases. Scaling beyond crypto natives means confronting hard realities like compliance requirements, KYC processes, trust-building, and actual distribution channels.
Becoming the Backend of Everything
DeLuca sees crypto's future as infrastructure, not identity. Think blockchains as boring but massive rails for payments, settlement, identity verification, and ownership tracking. Normal applications that hide the crypto completely and compete on user experience, pricing, speed, and trustworthiness. Speculation still exists, but it's contextual rather than foundational.
Crypto's "death" is actually the price of success. Just like the internet and cloud computing before it, crypto wins by becoming ubiquitous, invisible, and yes—boring.
