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It’s July 2025, and another half-year has passed, which in crypto time is equivalent to about three regular years. It’s the perfect time to take the temperature of the industry and ask ourselves what the heck is going on.
You have major news moments: administration changes, regulatory advancements, Bitcoin (BTC) all-time highs, concerning breaches, and big IPOs. You have new narratives emerging on the conference circuit: fresh layer-1s trying to stake their claims, infrastructure conversations dominated by L2s, an evolving DeFi stack, and the accelerating convergence of AI and blockchain. And in the background, there’s a notable vibe shift. Lately, a feeling of unrest has emerged on CT (aka Crypto Twitter), with commenters noting that what once felt like a movement has, for many, turned into a scramble, with scams and rug pulls dominating the headlines. They are calling for a reset, a return to building real products, solving real problems for real users, and rebuilding trust.
I don’t disagree with these commenters. And I, like many, find it hard to wrap my head around the unrelenting yet jagged progress in the crypto space. However, I find it easier to understand the industry by recognizing that the crypto landscape is unlike any other in tech. It plays by different rules and operates under different dynamics altogether.
After working in the blockchain space since 2017, I’ve often struggled to explain this world to friends and family. But I’ve started using the following metaphor: The crypto landscape operates more like places than products. And blockchains aren’t companies. They’re frontier towns in a newly discovered land. Let’s unpack the metaphor by mapping some of the prevailing narratives:
L1s: The settlements on the frontier
Each layer-1 blockchain—Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Bitcoin—is like a frontier town built on a stretch of untamed land. These towns are primitive at first: maybe there’s a saloon, a dusty main street, and a few folks building homes with their bare hands. The early settlers (developers, speculators, and infrastructure teams) are there because they believe in the potential value of the land, even if it’s risky, volatile, or barren right now.
Each L1 town competes to attract settlers and capital. Some towns are built around natural resources (Bitcoin: sound money), others around fertile soil (Ethereum: programmability), or strategic location (Solana: performance). But in every case, the pitch is the same: “Come build your future here.”
L2s: Roads, railways, and utilities
Layer 2s—such as Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP), ZKsync (ZK)—are the infrastructure that makes these towns livable. They’re the roads and railways that connect remote settlements to trade networks, or the plumbing and electricity that let you shower and charge your devices. Without them, most people wouldn’t settle here—it’s just too rough.
Rollups, zk-tech, bridges: these technologies might not be glamorous, but they’re essential to smoothing the terrain of a raw L1. They reduce congestion, improve speed, and make it feasible to imagine towns becoming cities. In many ways, the current moment in crypto is a race to lay down the interstate system in preparation for a wave of expected settlers (though the jury is still out on what is going to bring said settlers).
DeFi: The mercantile economy
DeFi protocols are the general stores, trading posts, and banks of the frontier. They let people exchange value, take out loans to build more infrastructure, and speculate on which towns will prosper. They’re risky—sometimes you get swindled or the bank disappears overnight—but they’re necessary to bootstrap a local economy.
Blockchain x AI: Gold beneath the mountains
With the breakneck pace of AI advancement over the last two years–and concerns mounting over the power that centralized “Big AI” companies will wield–the crypto space might actually find a killer use case that matters. If blockchains are towns, then AI is the gold buried in the surrounding hills.
And it makes sense: the AI models need governance and provenance, the data needs to be decentralized, and the compute needs to be shared. Blockchain provides the ledger, the incentive structure, and (maybe) the ethical scaffolding.
Several projects are making their bids for the gold rush in the machine economy—including NEAR, Peaq, and Akash—though it remains to be seen whether this value can be easily extracted (like panning for gold), or requires a complete rethinking of the terrain (like blowing up an entire mountain).
Why the mainstream hasn’t moved in yet
All metaphors have their limit—and we are reaching the end of this one—but it still provides us with the intuition on why crypto is still chasing that ever-elusive “mass adoption.”
Every single crypto project I’ve worked with (from L1s, to L2s, to DeFi protocols) faces the same dual mandate: 1) Getting speculators excited (i.e., generating awareness and attracting liquidity) and 2) Recruiting builders and entrepreneurs.
This becomes a chicken-and-egg problem. You want speculators to believe your town is worth their risk, and builders to believe their time and effort will be rewarded. And what both speculators and builders want to see is users.
But the average person (i.e., user) still lives in well-established cities. They have reliable services, recognizable institutions, and functioning economies. The frontier is messy. Buggy apps, high gas fees, bad UX. Moving here, to crypto frontier land, still requires conviction or an extremely high risk tolerance.
But the people building these towns believe—fervently—that eventually, the infrastructure will catch up. The plumbing will work. The sidewalks will be paved. And the advantages of sovereignty, transparency, and economic participation will be too compelling to ignore.
The frontier is taking shape
The frontier metaphor helps explain why crypto feels both chaotic and inevitable. It behaves more like a territorial expansion than a technology cycle. And while this is not the first time crypto has been compared to the “wild west,” by taking the comparison a few steps further, we can understand why every year in crypto feels like fits and starts of uneven progress. The truth is, not every outpost will survive, and in the end, the landscape will be littered with ghost towns (already termed “ghost chains”). But with the maturing of the category and convergence of technologies like AI, the gold rush is surely not over.
