The Long Grind
Crypto is in the same brutal mid-consolidation phase that Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all endured before secular forces forced the market to recognise what they had quietly become.
Investors are exhausted. Five years grinding below the November 2021 high has shifted the narrative to crypto being broken and the original thesis being wrong. This time is not different. This is what generational compounders look like in the middle of their consolidations. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Berkshire and Apple all went through the same shape. Each was written off at the lows with cover stories nearly identical in tone to what is being written about crypto today. Each resolved only when secular forces forced the market to update its definition of the asset. ETH, the broader altcoin market and total DeFi peaked together on 8 November 2021, fell roughly 80 percent, and have now spent 54 months below their highs. That puts crypto at the same elapsed point in the cycle as Amazon, Apple and Netflix during their own grinds. Meanwhile the receipts are arriving. Stablecoins have grown from 68 billion to 175 billion dollars. Tokenised commodities have gone from under 500 million to 5 billion. Three new categories have appeared from nothing during the consolidation. Tokenised funds at 14.8 billion. Tokenised stocks at 287 million. Almost 95,000 AI agents registered in the Ethereum ecosystem. In this post I walk through the five secular forces I think will end the argument over what crypto is, and how I am using them to shape the portfolio. The 2021 portfolio asked what a token could become. The 2026 portfolio asks what it is becoming, right now.