This is the foundation of trade and economics. Crypto offers financial freedom, we all know that. And every single day, new projects ship. Between 2019 and 2020 there were a few thousand active tokens. By 2024-2025, platforms like pump.fun pushed that number into the millions. So the game is no longer about production.
Because the old lock-and-thief equation holds here too. Someone builds a product, a lock, to create a safer environment. The thief picks the lock. The builders ship a better lock. The thief picks it again. That cycle never stops.
Crypto runs the exact same way. Builders contribute to the financial-freedom thesis by building things. Investors fund it. Scammers develop methods and rug. Right now, tools like vibecoding have sped up building so much that people with zero connection to tech or development have started shipping. Utility and long-term projects, the ones with a based team, have started collapsing. Investors no longer need to pour money into known, familiar tech. They are busy coding it themselves. Crypto got squeezed because it stopped being a safe harbor for capital. There is no mechanism to tell a legit project apart from a scam. A beautifully designed project turns out to be one guy. Nobody needs to touch trade terminals like Axiom anymore, because people are coding their own.
A serious shift is coming. Financial freedom and crypto will continue, but the known players are going to shift hard. That includes major coins and their ecosystems. Right now I can name 30 coins inside the CMC top 50 that will disappear completely.
Like I said, the lock-and-thief equation matters enormously to how financial freedom gets built in crypto. But the thief side is winning, so investors are running. So what has to happen? You build a better lock. And you need to stand with the people building the locks.
For memecoin builders
Here is my take. Memecoins usually don't carry a based-team structure, so the whole thing shifted to the OG side. Outside of channels and communities that already have an audience, making money on memecoins is hard. Unless you are core team or insider, finding a memecoin and actually making money on it is a real casino. Think of it like Twitch streaming. If you want to become a Twitch streamer, you first volunteer as a mod in a Discord community, you make yourself useful, and over time you become a core member of a trusted network. The real money comes from that core circle. If you want to go this route, start now: volunteer, add value, build your network.
For utility builders
Here is my take. If you are a solo dev and you want to make money on the building side, don't focus on a general idea, focus on a specific problem. Vibecoding makes shipping easier, but it does not hand you problem-solving. Before you write a single line, join the ecosystem communities and learn the actual problems and costs that investors and developers deal with. For example, there are a ton of people building with vibecoding. Find solutions that save them time or cut their costs. If you can take another developer's $300 a month down to $290, trust me, they will give you a shot. Or, far more important, build tools that keep investors from losing money. In a bull market everything is green, but when the tide goes out, the point is not just making money, it is not losing it. Because there is no edge. When the war heats up, you don't survive with a weapon, you survive with armor and defense. On top of that, go straight at rugpull techniques. Think like the thief. How are projects created, what is behind them, what infrastructure do they run on? Learn that. Build logic on top of it and create tools that protect investors. If you are a developer, I will hand you million-dollar ideas.
Now the part you probably care about most, the investor side
Here is my thinking and my advice for people putting money into crypto.
If you invest on the major-coin side, inside the CMC top 50, then trading on tier-1 exchanges like Binance makes sense. But if you like degen trading and you want to hunt a 1000x
D), the first thing you do is stop searching for tokens the dumb way and drop the CEXs. Pulling that kind of return from tokens you find on Dexscreener or pump.fun is (right now) close to impossible. Those "$5 turned into $500K" tweets only mean one thing. They get posted to pull fresh investors into the market, and that wallet is 99.9999% an insider wallet. So your $50 turning into $500K, forget it, even $5K is a fantasy. (I am talking about the current market.) There is an old line: "make friends with rich people, network = net worth." In crypto that is 100% true. You need to be close to the memecoin builders and utility builders from above. It is not that hard, just stay active in communities and on X. Who is building what, what are the trends, which X profiles are interacting, what are people posting about, what is developing across ecosystems. Get close to these projects. Push to get into the core team. Instead of the $20-$50 you would throw in every day, waiting and putting $500 into one single project will make you more money, trust me. Taking shots from the trenches every day with $20-50 is just a loss of time, money, and psychology. Because inside the system, you are exactly the investor profile they want. The real money goes to the people who built the system.
Focus on this: AI-based payment systems, AI audit and bug bounty systems, projects that merge crypto with real products, utility SaaS built on AI infrastructure, and infrastructure providers like Helius. Build alongside these, add real value, put in the work.
As for me, I've just been watching the market for about 7 months now. I do technical consulting in this space, but I'm not investing yet. Because there's no wave yet, and a dead-calm sea is pure chaos. I'm waiting for the right ecosystem to show up, the one already in my head, the one I know is coming.
