A Crypto VC’s Assessment: “The terminal has been reached—please disembark, all passengers.”
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A Crypto VC’s Assessment: “The terminal has been reached—please disembark, all passengers.”
Stop Being a “Crypto Bro” and Start Thinking Like a Fintech Veteran.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Avishay Ovadia (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Collider)
Translated by: TechFlow
TechFlow Intro: Collider is a small but insightful Israeli crypto VC—its perspective reflects upstream industry sentiment.
In this piece, Avishay Ovadia, Collider’s co-founder and managing partner, lays out his view on the future of crypto: the retail era is over; institutions aren’t here to “embrace decentralization”—they’re here to take it apart.
They want blockchain’s efficiency—not crypto’s ideology. For founders and investors alike, the old playbook is obsolete. The rules of the digital asset economy have completely changed.
Full Text:
For ten years, we told ourselves a fairy tale.
We believed mass adoption of crypto would be a bottom-up uprising: ordinary people, retail investors, would grow tired of banks, swallow the orange pill, and migrate to a permissionless utopia.
Last year, that fantasy was permanently debunked.
The newcomers weren’t the users we’d hoped for—they were gamblers. They weren’t searching for a new financial system; they were hunting for a higher-leverage casino. They traded memecoins, reaped each other, and vanished into the shadows the moment the music stopped.
Yet while retail chased losses on memecoins, something far more consequential happened: the “heavyweights”—institutions, banks, and payment giants—didn’t retreat. They went all in.
They didn’t come because they believe in decentralization. They discovered blockchain is the most efficient capital transfer infrastructure ever built. They’re not chasing technological ideals—they’re chasing profit. Larry Fink recently called tokenization one of the two defining trends reshaping financial services. We’re no longer talking about a niche market—we’re talking about a $140 trillion wholesale transformation.
A Great Transfer of Power
We handed over the keys to the kingdom ourselves. We built the infrastructure. We validated the concepts. Then the incumbents moved in to claim the territory.
We suffered from profound arrogance. We thought we could change them. We thought Bitcoin’s miracle could be replicated across any altcoin. We assumed they’d eventually buy our useless governance tokens, our ghost-town Layer 1s and Layer 2s—and play by our rules. Wrong. To institutions, surrendering control isn’t “progress”—it’s suicide. Their entire business model rests on control.
So they didn’t come down to play in our mud pit. The vast majority won’t join our DAOs, nor do they care about our “community vibes.” Instead, they’re building their own walled gardens—joining ecosystems like Canton, Zero, Tempo, and Kinexys, and constructing orchestration layers that bridge traditional platforms with new chains. They use blockchain, tokenization, instant settlement, and self-custody—but strip away the “crypto” skin.
They retain user privacy, data silos, and profits. They take our open-source code, fork our protocols—but don’t buy our tokens. They ingest the technology and eject the ideology.
The Trajectory of the Game’s Evolution
This game has evolved along a predictable, chaotic path to its current terminus.
2009–2014 was the Bitcoin Madman era—a small group of cypherpunks tinkering at the margins. Then came the Crypto Industry phase, with Ethereum and smart contracts taking center stage. The 2018 bear market shifted the narrative toward Blockchain Technology: enterprises tried to separate ledgers from assets—but failed. Next rose Web3—and its spectacular collapse—where NFTs, blockchain games, and creator economies briefly shone until the FTX implosion extinguished the lights entirely. In 2024, buoyed by the U.S. election cycle and Trump’s campaign, the Crypto Industry made a glamorous comeback—only to slide into a season of greed, revulsion, and toxicity.
Now, in this new bear market, we’ve finally arrived at the destination we’ve been racing toward: the Digital Asset Economy.
This is the terminus. Crypto is no longer an “industry”—it’s become a foundational layer. It’s the invisible engine powering the fintech world. It’s not crypto devouring Wall Street—it’s Wall Street devouring us.
Actually, This Is Good News
If you’re a purist, this feels like betrayal. If you’re a strategist, this is where real money lives.
We’ve finally reached the inflection point where trillions of dollars await deployment. We’ve entered the “Distributor Era.” Big money won’t move without regulation, without KYC, and without rails approved by the banking system. When DTCC announced plans to tokenize DTC-held assets—including liquid assets like the Russell 1000 Index—this wasn’t a pilot. It was the sound of floodgates opening.
We’re about to tokenize every asset on Earth—from real estate and private credit to government bonds. But most of it won’t happen via decentralized swaps on public blockchains. It’ll happen through payment giants and banks.
Mastering the Machine
There are two paths. You can crouch in the corner mourning the “death of crypto spirit.” Or you can recognize we’ve just won the largest financial war in history: we’ve convinced the world this technology works. Now, we must build for those who actually hold capital.
The future of this industry isn’t in vaporware tokens. It’s embedded in the hard infrastructure serving new players. It’s already live today: look at institutional-grade solutions broadcasting trillions of dollars in on-chain transactions, facilitating billions in inter-institutional trades, and tokenizing billions in assets. This is the new application layer.
A New Playbook
It’s time to stop acting like “crypto bros” and start thinking like seasoned fintech veterans.
Consider this: if every asset on Earth becomes tokenized, what competitive advantage remains in buying your specific “crypto” token? If you can trade any global asset—24/7—through a trusted traditional broker with instant settlement, why would you wire funds to an offshore exchange—or lose sleep over non-custodial wallets? Why worry about getting hacked and losing everything, when you can trade securely and effortlessly via existing financial dashboards?
Founders: don’t build in a vacuum. Before writing your first line of code, walk every distribution channel across the value chain. Understand their needs—and dive deep into their fears: fear of regulatory crackdowns, fear of losing control, fear of uncontrollable security incidents. Your job is to build something they cannot build themselves—but that slots seamlessly into their existing world.
Investors: the old playbook is dead. The days of early-stage bets on “low circulating supply, high FDV” vapor projects—followed by prayers for 100x retail exits—are over. Digital asset investing has become extraordinarily difficult. We’re moving toward real sales cycles, real utility, and revenue-generating businesses. You must back projects with genuine moats—even in an open-source technical world. 99.99% of tokens lack them. Finding those with strong moats, top-tier teams, real usage, token value accrual, institutional adoption, reasonable valuations, healthy token release schedules, active communities, high liquidity, risk management capability, and compelling market opportunity is hard. But it’s possible.
Stop fighting institutions. They are the new distribution channels. They’ll bring the next billion users—and the next $100 trillion—into the digital asset economy. Even if those users have no idea they’re using blockchain.
The game has changed. The players are bigger. The stakes are higher. Welcome to the terminus. What you do next is up to you.
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