"We spend a lot of time on the road meeting with LPs, fellow investors, and founders. No matter where the conversation starts - whether it's in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, London, or anywhere else - it often drifts to a simple, sometimes rhetorical question: Is any of this real? It's a fair question. Crypto has become a strange reflection of our economy and society more broadly: part financial spectacle, part social experiment, part collective delusion."
"And yet, buried under all the speculative noise, something real is taking shape. The most obvious sign is stablecoins bursting into the mainstream with a host of real-world use cases. Already, stablecoin circulation has reached more than $280 billion, and led financial incumbents to scramble for a response. The stablecoin boom reflects how institutional investors and asset managers are becoming less"
Crypto cycles have repeatedly produced speculative narratives such as quickly valued Layer 1s, NFTs turned cash grabs, Metaverse real estate, and collapsed play-to-earn games. The latest waves included a memecoin explosion that expanded token counts from about 20,000 in 2022 to over 27 million and drove substantial daily application revenue on chains like Solana. Perpetual futures offering extreme leverage have catered largely to retail traders. Popular retail apps such as Pump.fun, Hyperliquid, and Polymarket have amplified speculative activity. Amid the noise, stablecoins have gained mainstream traction with substantial circulation and are prompting institutional and incumbent responses.
Read at Fortune
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