Get Started with
Blockdaemon Today!
Contact us to learn how we can help you power your blockchain business.
Unparalleled Security & Compliance
Seamless Integration & Scalability
Dedicated Customer Support
Speculation built crypto’s first chapter. Conviction, AI, and institutional rails will define the next. Konstantin Richter, Blockdaemon’s Founder & CEO, reflects on rebuilding crypto for long-term utility.
Crypto built trillion-dollar ambitions on scaffolding that was never meant to be the foundation.
For most of the industry's existence, token speculation served a legitimate function. The token-price greed factor incentivized builders to build. Open-source development is expensive. Decentralized networks require massive coordination. Speculation provided capital that traditional venture funding couldn't deliver fast enough or at sufficient scale. This was a bootstrapping mechanism, and it worked—until it became the thing everyone optimized for instead of the thing that funded what everyone was supposed to be optimizing for.
The commercial realities of crypto are changing. Speculation no longer suffices to fund the on-ramps needed for the next 500 million people to come on-chain. Venture funds are drying up. Speculation has become too speculative even for hardened traders. The next wave of capital must come from elsewhere—ideally from legacy institutions finally investing in on-chain rails. But institutions require clear rules and aren't known for speed. Those rules will come, but until true scale drives up TAM multifold, time is needed.
This creates a brutal moment for any foundational, long-term focused crypto business. To survive, you must bridge the funding gap between long-term value and short-term speculation. Building foundational products that offer some short-term financial upside no longer suffices.
There are three answers to this problem that should drive every decision.
Bitcoin's founding principles—open-source development, decentralization, cryptographic verification—were designed to protect value for the individual. The original thesis was simple: build financial rails not owned or controlled by a single power. Break the model where institutions extract value from ordinary people through fees, opaque thresholds, and proprietary infrastructure. Replace it with self-executing code and encryption at massive scale.
That thesis has never been more relevant.
We are moving into an economy increasingly run by algorithms and autonomous agents. AI systems are already making purchasing decisions, routing capital, executing trades. In that world, the question of who controls the financial infrastructure—and whether individuals retain any agency within it—becomes existential.
Crypto's original promise is the just-in-time answer to a problem most people haven't fully grasped yet. The inability to plan through conventional metrics is precisely what makes this a moment for conviction rather than caution.
AI is changing everything about how software companies operate and is about to change how on-chain transactions move across decentralized networks. The entire user experience of value exchange is shifting simultaneously. This is a rare convergence: a market reset happening at the same moment a fundamental technology shift creates new infrastructure requirements—and a new way to build faster and better than ever before.
Making software is infinitely less expensive than it used to be. The only way to build products that realize the original vision—while funding becomes more challenging and engagement remains too low—is to transform everything about how you create and market. AI-first is the sole means of survival to reach massive adoption.
AI will not only transform how you build but will also teach you how to engage with agents and new forms of orchestration tooling that will birth the next foundation of cryptographic, agentic products. We used to focus on proximity of dollars spent to dollars made. Now it's about proximity of decision made to output.
Forge alliances with the people here to solve for the mission.
In every cycle I have witnessed—and I have been building blockchain infrastructure since 2017—the alliances forged at the bottom define the architecture of what comes next. When the price of commitment is highest, the signal about who is serious is clearest.
There aren't many believers left, but when they show up for you during a downturn, they are the ones you tell others about, the ones you build a business around. Conviction matters when it is expensive. Reward that conviction always.
The current downturn is painful. The uncertainty—geopolitical, technological, market-structural—makes traditional planning almost useless. The standard corporate playbook of scenario analysis and KPI dashboards doesn't work when the ground is shifting under every assumption simultaneously.
Which means it's time to take risks and to dare.
"Everything is broken" and "nothing left to lose" describe the same situation. The first framing paralyzes. The second liberates—specifically if you can re-envision your means of production and reconnect with the original mission.
I know it is dark out there for a lot of crypto companies. Do not lose sight of what is coming. Remember: the time to be daring is when others are paralyzed. Now is the time to believe, to reset, and to partner with the people who are here to change the plumbing of the world.
The builders who meant it.
Contact us to learn how we can help you power your blockchain business.
