Why Web3 Founders Are Still Optimistic About Crypto

• Despite a string of high-profile collapses in the crypto industry, Web3 founders remain optimistic.
• Insider spoke with eight founders about why their confidence in crypto hasn’t wavered.
• They said they believed Web3 can make the global economy more accessible and enhance creativity.

It was far from a banner year for crypto markets in 2022, to put it mildly.

All told, the collapse of Three Arrows Capital, Voyager Digital, Celsius, FTX, Alameda Research, and BlockFi wiped out more than $20 billion in assets. And the bad news hasn’t stopped coming. Another crypto lender, Genesis, filed for bankruptcy on January 19.

Yet little of this seems to faze the people seeking to build crypto and Web3 businesses in this environment, despite some venture capitalists reconsidering their level of investment in crypto and Web3. 

Countless founders have insisted that crypto has gotten too much attention for its excesses and blowups and not enough for its potential. Among the touted — though very much nascent and not fully proven — use cases: giving artists and musicians a cut of secondary sales, enabling lightning-fast global payments, tracking and offsetting carbon emissions, and creating a more secure way to access online services.

Over the past few months, there’s been the constant refrain, “It’s still early days.” The implosion of FTX and the arrest of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, now considered the poster child for bad behavior in crypto, aren’t an indictment of the industry, sources said, but of financial regulation — or the lack thereof. The promises of Web3 and blockchain technologies are quite distinct from speculative trading in assorted cryptocurrencies, they said.

“The story that most people knew about crypto was, ‘I buy a token, the token goes up, I make money,'” said Omoju Miller, the founder and CEO of the Web3 company Fimio. “We need a new narrative.”

In the midst of all the carnage, it’s easy to wonder: Are these people delusional? So we decided to ask a few founders why they’re still so bullish on crypto even after the turmoil of the past year. Here’s what they said.

Quotes have been condensed for length and clarity.