Is Crypto Finished? Builders, Analysts and Founders Share Insights

The question of crypto's supposed death pops up so often it feels like part of the cycle. Prices fall, headlines turn sour, and search engines light up. Every major drawdown, you can watch the same spike on Google and social feeds as people type the exact same words. It is almost as predictable as the volatility itself.

Bitcoin alone has been pronounced dead over 450 times, according to a long-running obituary tracker. On paper, it should be harder than ever to make that claim. Spot ETFs are live. Stablecoins move trillions. Real-world assets are being tokenized by the same institutions that once dismissed the entire sector. Governments passed laws. Banks built products. Crypto rails slipped into the background infrastructure of global finance.

Yet the lived experience has been messier. Token prices bled across the board. Retail fled. Liquidity evaporated in long-tail assets. Macro shocks, tariffs, and shifting rate expectations drained momentum. Builder activity kept rising while sentiment charts slid into “extreme fear.” Anyone watching nothing but red candles could be forgiven for thinking the experiment was over.

So for this piece, we stepped outside the headline cycle and spoke directly with the people closest to the underlying signal: founders, protocol architects, DePIN builders, tokenization specialists, stablecoin operators, and long-time crypto analysts. We asked them the following questions:

• When you hear people say “crypto is dead,” what do you think they actually mean?
• What metrics do you personally look at to decide whether crypto is dying or evolving?
• What would need to happen for you to confidently say crypto is dead?
• What would convince skeptics that crypto is far from dead?

What follows is a clear-eyed look at whether crypto is actually dying, told by the people who live with the consequences long after the headlines fade.

Why the “Crypto Is Dead” Narrative Refuses to Die

The headline persists because it resonates with the people who read it. Fear moves faster than nuance, and in a market built on volatility, fear has an endless supply of fuel. When prices fall, people look for a simple story to make sense of the chaos, and “crypto is dead” offers a clean, comforting answer.

Media incentives reinforce the cycle. A headline about a collapse draws far more attention than a quiet announcement about banks tokenizing assets or L2 throughput hitting new highs. Outlets respond to what readers click, and readers click most when sentiment is already fragile. This creates a feedback loop where downturns generate more coverage, and the coverage amplifies the downturn’s emotional weight.

There is also a psychological bias at play. Most people experience crypto through price charts, not through the systems running underneath. They see red candles, not the trillions flowing through stablecoins or the thousands of developers shipping upgrades across ecosystems. Infrastructure work happens out of sight, in GitHub commits, corporate pilots, settlement layers, and regulatory filings. None of that shows up in the feeds where most people form their impressions.

Because of that, each market correction triggers the same reflexive reaction. The public equates falling prices with technological failure, even when the opposite is true. Usage rises as speculation cools. Networks become cheaper and more reliable during drawdowns. Institutions scale their pilots while retail retreats. But the disconnect between perception and reality ensures that the “death” narrative resurfaces like clockwork.

The real reason the narrative refuses to die is simple: it is easier to declare the end of an industry than to explain how it is quietly becoming infrastructure. Spectacle is legible. Pipes are not. Crypto is moving into the plumbing of global finance, and plumbing rarely trends.

So, Is Crypto Dead?

No, the people closest to the infrastructure don’t think crypto is dead, and not because they’re bullish by default, but because the evidence simply doesn’t line up with the obituary. Across every answer, the same pattern emerges: when sentiment falls, usage rises; when prices crash, builders keep building; when headlines cool off, adoption spreads beneath the surface.

The “death” narrative tends to follow the chart, not the technology. It reflects exhaustion, frustration, or misplaced expectations far more than it reflects what is actually happening on-chain. Stablecoins settle trillions. Developers continue to expand the ecosystem. Institutions that once dismissed crypto now rely on it.

If crypto were truly dying, the machinery holding it together would be decaying, but every meaningful indicator points in the opposite direction.

The True Meaning of the “Crypto is Dead” Narrative

The phrase resurfaces every now and then, but when you ask the people who actually operate inside the industry, you find it rarely means what the headlines imply. For some, it’s a reaction to price crashes. For others, it signals disappointment in the narrative they believed in. And for many, it’s simply a proxy for frustration rather than an assessment of the underlying technology. Here’s how industry leaders explained it to The Coin Bureau.

What The Experts Think

Most people saying “crypto is dead” are reacting to short-term pain, not long-term fundamentals, Coinme COO Sung Choi told The Coin Bureau. Bitcoin has been pronounced dead more than 450 times, almost always near cycle bottoms, only to recover and set new highs. He noted that Bitcoin has still delivered a 74% compound annual growth rate over the past decade. In his view, the obituary headlines are predictable clickbait, not analysis.

For Hedy Wang, CEO and co-founder of Block Street, the phrase has nothing to do with technology. “Most of the time they just mean prices are down and they’re cranky,” she said. She added that the narrative ignores the reality that major financial institutions are scaling tokenization behind the scenes while retail sentiment swings wildly.

FPBlock CEO Wesley Crook said the death narrative almost always reflects price fixation. People react to falling tokens, he said, rather than noticing the simultaneous expansion of enterprise integrations, payments infrastructure, and blockchain adoption across industries. To him, it reveals market psychology, not technological decline.

Nvestiq co-founder Aman Anand described the phrase as a response to emotional exhaustion. People aren’t declaring the tech dead, he said, “they’re declaring the story dead.” The comment surfaces during periods of volatility, regulatory noise, or the collapse of hype-driven projects, not when evaluating long-term fundamentals.

99Bitcoins general manager Tayler McCraken said the narrative often reflects disappointment rather than diagnosis. Some feel the early decentralized ideal has faded. Others mistake the end of parabolic price runs for the end of the entire asset class. And many conflate the collapse of fraudulent actors with the collapse of crypto itself. He said the industry is shifting from speculation to infrastructure, noting that “when the hype dies, the utility lives.”

Bringing a more global, data-driven view, Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO Network, said people declare crypto dead whenever the price drops, but real health comes from builder momentum. Ethereum added over 16,000 developers in 2025. Solana’s builder base grew more than 60% in two years. DePIN revenues expanded 100x. These signals, he said, show an ecosystem compounding underneath sentiment cycles.

Finally, Dr. David Utzke, CEO of MyKey Technologies and a former member of the IRS Cyber Crimes Unit, said the phrase often marks the end of a phase, not the end of crypto. Some assets may fail outright, he said, especially those being used in ways their architectures were never designed to support. But the category itself evolves. He pointed to earlier transitions from early cryptographic money to DLT-based systems, and eventually toward synthetic currencies and quantum-native assets. “Crypto doesn’t die,” he said. “It metamorphoses.”

How Experts Decide Whether Crypto Is Dying or Evolving

Industry leaders rarely look at price to judge the health of crypto. Instead, they follow usage, builders, institutional flows, and infrastructure-level signals that move independently of sentiment.

What the Experts Think

For Choi, the clearest signals are economic reality, not sentiment. He pointed to stablecoins settling $27.6 trillion in 2024, a figure that surpasses Visa and Mastercard combined. He noted the sharp rise in year-over-year stablecoin velocity, the surge in crypto-denominated global payments, and the steady march of institutional allocation across pensions, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. When companies like PayPal use stablecoins to pay enterprise vendors, Choi said, it's difficult to argue the ecosystem is shrinking.

Wang said she watches one thing first: whether builders are still building. “I check if devs are still shipping and if on-chain activity keeps rising,” she said. For her, tokenized asset volume is one of the most reliable indicators. If institutions continue putting real-world assets on-chain, it’s clear the experiment isn’t slowing down.

For Crook, the strongest signals show up where people rarely look: enterprise payments and infrastructure. He watches companies like Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Western Union, and PayPal integrate stablecoin settlement and blockchain rails. When the largest payment processors begin treating crypto infrastructure as part of their backend stack, it’s obvious the technology is embedding itself into the global system rather than fading from it.

Anand evaluates fundamentals that barely move with sentiment: developer activity across ecosystems, the number of active addresses, institutional custody flows, stablecoin velocity, and scaling throughput on L2s. These metrics hold or rise in bear markets, Anand said, and that stability is what signals evolution rather than decline. If the underlying pipes strengthen while sentiment collapses, he considers that a bullish long-term indicator.

For McCraken, the industry’s health is defined by four pillars: builder engagement, on-chain utility, institutional integration, and network security. He tracks monthly developer counts, commit volume, DeFi TVL, transaction fees, ETF inflows, hash rate strength, and decentralization metrics like the Nakamoto coefficient. When these trend upward together, you’re looking at an ecosystem undergoing a Darwinian cleanup, not a collapse, he said.

Dr. Utzke added a more technical lens. He looks at code robustness, exploit history, validator distribution, cybersecurity posture, and whether network activity reflects genuine economic value. Metrics like NVT and TVL tell him far more about system health than market cap or address counts. In his view, “market perception may swing wildly, but technological integrity moves slowly,” and that’s what reveals whether crypto is dying or evolving.

What Would Actually Need to Happen for Crypto to Be “Dead”?

When you ask builders and industry veterans what a true endgame looks like for crypto, their answers have almost nothing to do with price. In every case, the bar for “death” sits far beyond anything the market has experienced so far.

What the Experts Think

For Choi, crypto could only be considered dead if multiple core pillars broke at the same time. That would require transaction volumes collapsing across major networks, institutions exiting entirely, and companies like Visa, Mastercard, and J.P. Morgan abandoning stablecoin initiatives. It would also require a coordinated global regulatory shutdown capable of choking off open networks simultaneously, plus a failure in the underlying technology itself. “None of these conditions exist,” Choi said, noting that every indicator is pointing in the opposite direction: usage rising, institutions accumulating, and infrastructure investment accelerating.

Wang said a true death scenario would be defined by silence. “If every GitHub repo went quiet, if builders stopped experimenting with tokenized T-bills or on-chain treasuries, that would be a real signal,” she said. As long as developers continue putting everything from funds to invoices on-chain, she doesn't see a credible path where the industry flatlines.

For Crook, the only meaningful definition of crypto dying is a reversal of adoption. Companies would need to rip out blockchain integrations they already rely on for payments, supply chains, identity, or data verification. Instead, he said, the opposite is happening. He added that skeptics would rethink the entire narrative the moment they personally compare a slow, expensive international bank transfer with a 10-second USDC transaction on Solana or Base.

Anand said crypto dies only if permissionless networks stop attracting both builders and liquidity. It would require a global freeze on innovation, regulatory regimes aligned to suppress experimentation, and an ecosystem-wide retreat from decentralized infrastructure. He called that convergence “extremely unlikely.”

McCraken laid out a more formal checklist: a catastrophic cryptographic or consensus failure across major chains, a coordinated global ban powerful enough to shut down open-source infrastructure everywhere, and a near-total collapse in developer participation. Price crashes don’t meet that bar. Only a breakdown in the math, the governance, and the human participation could end the ecosystem.

Levin said the premise of crypto “dying” misunderstands how technological eras evolve. In the same way the internet shifted from Web1 to Web2 to Web3, crypto would morph rather than disappear. Even a sustained drop in developer inflows, regulatory pressure across G7 markets, and venture capital drying up wouldn’t kill it; it would merely change the form. Ownership as a digital primitive doesn’t vanish once invented.

Dr. Utzke pointed to history. In the 90s, people declared gaming dead. In the early 2000s, critics said digital cash had failed. Both were quietly evolving in the background. Digital assets move the same way: early cryptographic money gave rise to DLT-based systems, which will eventually give way to synthetic currencies and quantum-native assets. “Technology is never dead,” he said. “It changes shape.” Bitcoin itself may be replaced someday, but the broader category isn’t going anywhere.

What Would Convince Skeptics That Crypto Isn’t Dead?

Skeptics rarely change their minds because of price recoveries. What shifts their perspective is evidence that crypto delivers utility, solves real problems, and is being adopted by the very institutions and industries that once dismissed it.

What the Experts Think

Skeptics tend to reconsider their position once the loudest former critics become active participants, Coinme’s Choi said. Larry Fink once called Bitcoin an "index of money laundering;" now BlackRock runs the world’s largest Bitcoin ETF. Jamie Dimon called crypto a fraud; JPMorgan now processes a billion dollars a day through its blockchain networks. Even PayPal reversed its caution and launched a stablecoin used to pay enterprise vendors. When institutions that once dismissed crypto begin relying on it, the narrative naturally shifts.

Wang said skeptics pay attention when the creative engine refuses to slow down. Builders continue experimenting with tokenized treasuries, on-chain payments, and new financial products. “As long as people are tokenizing everything from funds to invoices, the idea of decline doesn’t match reality.”

For Crook, nothing is more persuasive than firsthand experience. The moment someone compares a slow, expensive international wire transfer to a 10-second stablecoin payment, the skepticism usually evaporates. When the UX gap becomes undeniable, the “crypto is dead” refrain begins to sound as outdated as early claims that the internet itself was a passing fad.

Anand said skeptics respond to visible utility. Instant settlement, tokenized assets, transparent compliance, and frictionless cross-border transfers are the kinds of workflows that make the debate irrelevant. Once these functions become normal parts of financial systems, the question of whether crypto is alive or dead simply disappears.

McCraken pointed to structural trends that even skeptics can’t ignore: ETF inflows from pensions and sovereign funds, accelerating RWA tokenization, trillions moving through stablecoins, and rising developer engagement across ecosystems. When traditional finance builds on crypto rails and emerging markets rely on stablecoins as lifelines, skepticism loses its footing, he said.

Utility at the edges of the financial system also persuades people, Levin said. In Nigeria and across South America, stablecoins are more reliable than local currencies. DePIN networks are growing, fintech apps now integrate crypto yields and payments, and tokenization is going mainstream. As user experience improves, adoption becomes incentive-driven. “In the end,” he said, “we don’t need to convince anyone. Utility and economic reality will do the work.”

Dr. Utzke said skeptics respond to evidence that meets their threshold for proof. Some digital assets will fail, he acknowledged, and skeptics will see those collapses as validation. But the broader ecosystem evolves in waves. Like gaming or the early internet, what matters is showing which parts endure and why. That, he said, is ultimately what convinces skeptics that crypto isn’t dying.

Closing Thoughts

Crypto’s obituary has been written for more than a decade, yet the industry keeps evolving into something larger, more useful, and more embedded in global infrastructure. What disappears are phases, narratives, hype cycles, and weak projects, not the core idea. The people shaping the space see a technology that is moving through its own version of creative destruction, shedding old layers while new ones form.

The loudest signals aren’t in the headlines or the price feeds, but in the places where real users, developers, and institutions show up. Their actions point to a world where crypto becomes less visible but more essential, woven into payments, finance, identity, and digital ownership in ways that feel ordinary rather than radical.

If anything is dying, it’s the misconception that crypto’s fate can be read from a chart. The ecosystem is shifting from spectacle to infrastructure. And once technology reaches that stage, the question stops being whether it’s alive and becomes how far it will go.