The crypto sector is currently enduring a “quiet quitting crisis,” according to a hedge fund and digital asset veteran.
Quiet quitting, a term that was popularized in 2022, refers to employees who do the bare minimum level of work their jobs require and “quit” the idea of doing anything extra.
Travis Kling, the founder and chief investment officer of Ikigai Asset Management, says the phrase accurately illustrates the current state of the crypto landscape.
“What I’m seeing and hearing is that a meaningful swath of the crypto community is simply much less engaged than in prior years. And they are much less engaged because there is much less belief in the potential of crypto projects to solve real-world problems and gain significant adoption as a result. That was a dream that was consistently sold and bought from 2017 (the year I got in) until 2022 – ‘crypto will solve real-world problems and gain significant adoption as a result.’ Many billions of dollars of venture capital funding were raised on this premise.”
Kling argues that it’s now apparent “how utterly pointless and ridiculously overvalued” so many crypto projects are.
“Crypto enthusiasts cannot see what is going to drive the next big leg up. No DeFi summer. No NFT summer. Gaming is currently DOA (dead on arrival). Metaverse turned out to be a complete joke. Decentralized social media has flatlined. People are trying to get excited about crypto x AI (artificial intelligence), but I (along with many others) think that excitement is likely misplaced (at least thus far).
DePIN is working and growing and is exciting – probably the brightest spot in the alts landscape at the moment. So that’s certainly a sector folks are looking to for strong future price performance driven by real-world adoption. But those areas in crypto are few and far between.”
DePIN stands for decentralized physical infrastructure networks, which aim to leverage blockchain technology to give individuals or companies control over physical infrastructure like wireless connectivity, data storage or compute power in a decentralized manner.
Kling also argues that crypto is “not that early.”
“Bitcoin is worth a trillion bucks and half of Wall Street owns it at this point. All the rest of crypto is worth another trillion. Tether owns more Treasuries than Germany. There’s been more than $20 billion of venture capital poured into this space in the last four years. We’re not that early. Stop with the comparisons to ‘the internet in the late 90s and look what happened there.’ This ain’t the internet in the late 90s. Bitcoin has product-market fit and stables have product-market fit and the rest of this stuff is lost at sea.
Solutions looking for problems at best, a relentless and brutal grift at worst.”
Despite his feelings about the sector, Kling does think that if former President Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November, his future administration could usher in a regulatory regime that could boost altcoins.
“We’ve been talking about this concept for years here – value creation and value accrual, and the bridge between the two being token structure. In a Trump administration, it could potentially be out with the worthless governance tokens, in with the yield-bearing, token-burning pseudo-securities – courtesy of a US regulatory framework that allows for such a thing. That’s a world where two years from now you could imagine a much less Fugazi Alt landscape.”
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