Buy Crypto- Markets
Futures- Spot
- Copy Trade
- Earn
- More
You Should Also Believe in <strong>Crypto</strong>
If you have been in the crypto industry for the past few years, you must have felt the increasingly strong sense of "fatigue."
During the last weekend, Aevo co-founder Ken Chan's lengthy article undoubtedly struck a chord with many. He used an extreme title — "I've Wasted 8 Years of My Life in the Crypto Industry."
This is not an individual's state but the collective fatigue of industry participants. Ken wrote about many truths that many dare not admit: in the crypto industry, it is indeed easy to lose a sense of time.
Nothing Happens Without Reason
You may have stayed up all night for an airdrop, watched the charts for a project launch, chased pumps and dumps for a narrative, researched a new protocol all night, or engaged in countless uncompensated labor for community governance. From the romantic liberalism to the on-chain governance experiment, and now to today's meme, perpetuals, and the frenzy of the degenerate race, it is enough to make one wonder: are we really participating in a technological revolution, or are we working for an infinitely greedy casino?
The skepticism of practitioners is not because they are not firm enough but because of the crypto industry's cruel structure itself: narrative life cycles are shorter than product life cycles; hype outweighs fundamentals; speculation speed far exceeds development speed; hero worship coexists with collective doubt; the endgame of many projects is not failure but disappearance.
It must be frankly said that Ken's feelings are experienced by many. And these doubts are not groundless.
The weight of the question "What are we really holding on to?" may be far greater than "Will Bitcoin's price rise again?"
So when we say "we believe in crypto," what exactly are we believing in? Are we believing in the project teams? No. Are we believing in a celebrity KOL? Certainly not. Are we believing in a series of narratives? Even less likely.
Many people will suddenly realize that the only thing they have truly believed in all along is likely just one thing: what we are still holding on to and believing in is the meaning of crypto for this world.
Therefore, shortly after Ken's article went viral, Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, quickly wrote another response article — "I Don't Regret Spending Eight Years in the Crypto Industry."
What is the significance of cryptocurrency to this world? Nic Carter provided his five points of view: making the monetary system more robust, encoding business logic with smart contracts, making digital property real, enhancing capital market efficiency, and expanding global financial inclusion.
Never Forget Why We Started
Whenever the industry is in chaos, perhaps we can reread the Bitcoin whitepaper.
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash, the first sentence of the whitepaper states.
In 2008, the financial crisis, bank failures, the thunderous collapse of Lehman Brothers. Financiers and politicians made the entire world pay for their risks and mistakes.
The birth of Bitcoin was not to create wealth but to answer a question: "Can we establish a currency system that does not rely on any centralized institution?"
For the first time in history, humanity had a currency that did not require trust in anyone. It is the only financial system in the world that truly does not belong to any country, company, or individual. You can criticize ETH, criticize Solana, criticize all L2s, criticize all DEXs, but few will criticize Bitcoin because its original intention has never changed.
Any Web2 company can close your account tomorrow, but no one can stop you from sending a Bitcoin transaction tomorrow. There will always be people who dislike it, do not believe in it, or even attack it, but no one can change it.
Water is unpretentious, yet it benefits all things.
The normalization of global inflation, soaring sovereign debt, prolonged decline in risk-free rates leading to asset shortages, financial oppression, lack of privacy... The presence of these issues means that the vision of the cryptocurrency industry is not outdated but rather more urgent. As Nic Carter said, "I have never seen a technology more capable of driving the upgrade of capital market infrastructure than cryptocurrency."
Why This Is Not a Failed Industry
Ken said he wasted eight years. But did we really waste our youth?
In hyperinflationary countries such as Argentina, Turkey, and Venezuela, BTC and stablecoins have become a practical "shadow financial system"; hundreds of millions of people who cannot access the banking system have for the first time owned global digital assets; humanity has, for the first time, globally owned assets that can be self-managed; international payments no longer require banks for the first time; billions of people are for the first time exposed to the same financial system; financial infrastructure is beginning to transcend national borders; an asset that does not rely on violence and power is starting to be recognized globally...
For a high-inflation country, a stable and non-depreciating currency is like a Noah's Ark, so stablecoins account for 61.8% of Argentina's crypto transaction volume. For freelancers with overseas businesses, digital nomads, and the wealthy, USDT is their digital dollar.
Compared to keeping dollars under the mattress or risking exchanging currency on the black market, clicking a mouse to convert pesos to USDT seems more elegant and secure.
Whether it's a cash transaction with a street vendor or a USDT transfer among the elite, it fundamentally reflects a lack of trust in the country's credit and a desire to protect private property. In a high-tax, low-welfare, continuously depreciating currency country, every "gray transaction" is a resistance against systemic plunder.
For a hundred years, the Pink House in Buenos Aires has seen a succession of owners, and the peso has undergone devaluation after devaluation. But relying on underground transactions and gray wisdom, the common people have managed to find a way out of the dead end. Related reading: "Underground Argentina: Jewish Moneylenders, Chinese Supermarkets, Laid-back Youth, and Reverting Middle Class"
Almost all of the top 20 global funds have established Web3 divisions; TradFi institutions continue to pour in (BlackRock, Fidelity, CME); national digital currency systems are referencing Bitcoin; all of America's digital asset ETFs are setting new records for inflows; in just 15 years, Bitcoin has risen to become one of the top ten financial assets globally...
Despite bubbles, speculation, chaos, and scams, some facts have indeed occurred. These changes have subtly altered the world. And we stand in an industry that will continue to reshape the global financial structure.
Have we really left nothing behind?
Many people still ask: "If in 15 years, none of these chains are left, projects are gone, protocols are replaced by more advanced infrastructure. Aren't we just wasting our youth on what we're doing now?"
But consider another industry: in 2000, the Internet bubble burst, and the NASDAQ plummeted by 78%; in 1995, Amazon was called "a website that sells books"; in 1998, Google was considered "less user-friendly than Yahoo"; in 2006, social networks were seen as "teenage rebellion."
The early days of the Internet were filled with: thousands of dead startup companies; vanished innovations; massive investments gone awry; tens of thousands of people thinking they wasted their youth.
Early BBSs, portals, dial-up internet, and paid email services have almost disappeared today, and 90% of first-generation mobile internet products have not survived. But they are by no means "wasted"; they formed the foundation of the mobile era.
The infrastructure they created—the browser, TCP/IP, early servers, compilers—achieved everything: Facebook, Google, Apple, mobile internet, cloud computing, AI. The development history of social networks is a constantly shattered cycle, just as TikTok today is composed of countless deceased social networks.
Each generation replaces the previous one, but no generation is futile.
No industry has a clean, linear, clear, correct, or definitive path. All foundational technology industries have experienced chaos, bubbles, trial and error, and misunderstanding until they changed the world.
The crypto industry is no different.
The technological revolution of the crypto industry has never been completed by a single generation. Everything we do, even if ETH is replaced by another chain in the future, L2 is rewritten with a new architecture, and the DEXs we use today all disappear, will never be in vain.
Because what we provide is the foundational soil, the trial and error, the parameters, the social experiment, the path dependence, the experience and samples absorbed by the future—not the final destination itself.
Moreover, you are not alone in persisting.
There are still millions of developers, researchers, fund managers, node operators, builders, and traders worldwide who are slowly pushing forward in this era. We are with you.
—Written for those who are still on this road.
You may also like
1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
Parse Noise's newly launched Beta version, how to "on-chain" this heat?
Is Lobster a Thing of the Past? Unpacking the Hermes Agent Tools that Supercharge Your Throughput to 100x
Declare War on AI? The Doomsday Narrative Behind Ultraman's Residence in Flames
Crypto VCs Are Dead? The Market Extinction Cycle Has Begun
Claude's Journey to Foolishness in Diagrams: The Cost of Thriftiness, or How API Bill Increased 100-Fold
Edge Land Regress: A Rehash Around Maritime Power, Energy, and the Dollar
Arthur Hayes Latest Interview: How Should Retail Investors Navigate the Iran Conflict?
Just now, Sam Altman was attacked again, this time by gunfire
Straits Blockade, Stablecoin Recap | Rewire News Morning Edition
From High Expectations to Controversial Turnaround, Genius Airdrop Triggers Community Backlash
The Xiaomi electric vehicle factory in Beijing's Daxing district has become the new Jerusalem for the American elite
Lean Harness, Fat Skill: The Real Source of 100x AI Productivity
Ultraman is not afraid of his mansion being attacked; he has a fortress.
US-Iran Negotiations Collapse, Bitcoin Faces Battle to Defend $70,000 Level
Reflections and Confusions of a Crypto VC
1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
App