Is The Crypto-Native Era Coming to an End? - Lessons from 10 Years in Crypto

The crypto-native period is transitioning from a self-referential subculture into invisible global infrastructure where users benefit from blockchain rails without ever knowing they exist.

Chronological Deep Dives

The Transition to Invisible Infrastructure

• Poly Market currently ranks among the top sites for traffic alongside Robin Hood and Coinbase.
• Most visitors seek information or odds rather than on-chain interaction.
• The "MMO RPG" phase of crypto—where participation required a specific identity—is ending.
• Future success depends on applications that use stablecoins or prediction markets as "invisible" payment rails.

“The mission was never to make everyone cryptonative. The mission was to make the world with the tools we built better, even if the world forgets what they're called.”

Speaker Attribution: Joey Krug

The Evolution of Prediction Markets

• Augur was built to survive a nuclear apocalypse. This design choice resulted in $100 transaction fees.
• Poly Market succeeded by prioritizing user experience and correctly timing the regulatory environment.
• Prediction markets will eventually mirror global exchanges like the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a massive derivatives market) rather than traditional sportsbooks.
• The shift from "bucket shops" (private houses betting against users) to transparent exchanges will drive massive volume.

“I would personally rather use a system that's not trust-based and I think crypto is like a lot of those features of crypto I think are going to continue to stay.”

Speaker Attribution: Joey Krug

The Ethics of Information Markets

• Banning insider trading often hands profits to those willing to break the law.
• Allowing insiders to trade accelerates price discovery. This reduces the total value captured by any single actor.
• Speed bumps (artificial delays) are necessary to prevent market makers from front-running retail participants.
• Krug proposes a model where executive profits from insider trades are redirected to corporate buybacks or shareholder dividends.

“There is more value lost for the average shareholder from insider trading being illegal than if it were legal.”

Speaker Attribution: Joey Krug

The Ethereum Valuation Crisis

• Bitcoin functions as digital gold. It relies on a pure scarcity narrative.
• Ether requires fee revenue to sustain its monetary premium. Investors view the lack of "burn" or revenue as a lack of a price floor.
• The expansion of blockspace through L2 (Layer 2 scaling solutions that sit on top of a base blockchain) creates a supply-demand imbalance that suppresses fees.
• Krug argues that Ethereum must decide to embrace a capitalist model that captures value from its network activity.

“When the revenue kind of rounds down to zero, then people kind of have this attitude that there's no floor.”

Speaker Attribution: Joey Krug

The 2026 Attention Bottleneck

• Anticipated IPOs for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI in 2025 or 2026 will attract significant capital.
• Investors will likely rotate funds from BTC and ETH to gain exposure to frontier AI assets.
• This liquidity drain might finally break the traditional four-year crypto cycle.
• The "maximum hype" moment for AI next year could mark a local bottom for crypto valuations.

“It makes me bearish crypto short-term but it makes me kind of makes me bullish going into the end of next year.”

Speaker Attribution: Joey Krug

Investor & Researcher Alpha

• The New Bottleneck: Attention and liquidity are the primary constraints. The 2026 IPO window for AI giants represents a major headwind for crypto valuations as investors seek "frontier" exposure elsewhere.
• Capital Movement: Founders Fund is targeting "U-shaped" founders. These individuals possess extreme spikes in specific technical or leadership skills rather than well-rounded profiles.
• Obsolete Research: Building for "pure" decentralization (e.g., decentralized front-ends) is no longer a viable path to market fit. The market rewards "invisible" crypto backends that prioritize speed and UI.

Strategic Conclusion

The next decade focuses on distribution rather than discovery. Success requires bridging legacy finance into on-chain rails while stripping away the "crypto" branding to reach the next billion users. The industry must transition from a niche game into the invisible plumbing of global finance.