I am struggling because it has become worse than I expected.
The problem with this space is that the moment you try to build with even a minimum level of ethics, long term thinking and basic decency, you are immediately framed as irrelevant.
Attention is no longer a function of substance. It is a function of volume, provocation and monetizable narratives.
There are almost no OGs left who are willing to engage in open discourse.
The ones who actually understand cycles, infrastructure, liquidity dynamics and user behaviour have either withdrawn into private networks or gone completely silent.
There are a few exceptions.
The visible surface is dominated by engagement farming and follower monetization, where visibility itself has become the primary product.
Value creation and success have fully decoupled. The less tangible output someone has and the more abstract, repetitive and empty the messaging becomes, the more the algorithms reward it.
And what’s even worse, the more idiots enter the emptiness.
It is an incentive structure that penalizes competence and rewards performance, speed and emotional manipulation.
At the same time the crowd is searching for figures to believe in.
Not for builders, not for engineers, not for people who ship, but for identities.
For projection surfaces. In a space that has lost its narrative coherence, personalities replace vision.
What this ecosystem has turned into is almost unrecognizable.
It used to be a laboratory for coordination, for alternative economic models, for permissionless innovation.
Now it is saturated with vaporware, with products that are outdated at the moment of release, built for metrics rather than for users, solving theoretical problems in closed feedback loops.
What many forget is that despite AI and useless token-scan bots as an example, what really matters are the people behind it and the knowledge and energy they bring. Everything else can be built. Or you can buy it.
The asymmetry of contribution is one of the hardest realities to process for me.
We amplified thousands. We provided, infrastructure, credibility, time, knowledge and actual human support.
Yet reciprocity is almost non existent.
Not because individuals are necessarily malicious, but because the system has no memory.
It does not reward those who enable others. It only rewards those who extract the fastest.
Yes, it has always been a space of financial extraction. That was visible from the beginning.
What is more disturbing is the depth of the current extraction layer. It is no longer just about capital. It is about attention, trust, cognitive capacity, emotional labour and time.
It is about the conversion of human energy into short lived narrative cycles.
Builders are no longer the core resource of this ecosystem. They are its fuel.
And that is the structural shift. This is no longer only an economically extractive environment.
It is an energetically extractive one.
I am struggling because it has become worse than I expected.
Crypto and the space have reached a point where nothing has real value anymore. And I am not talking about market caps.
And going up against the big players with deep pockets is not a business model that works.
Because no one else participates unless they can extract something for themselves: knowledge, energy, or money