I've been into crypto since 2017 and in that time I've seen several tokens I've vested in go to near zero and witnessed billions of dollars in value evaporate!
And now it seems that maybe the risk-on investors are turning away from crypto and looking at prediction-markets....
The Great Crypto Token Die-Off
According to some analysts over 11 million altcoins basically disappeared last year. That’s about $150 billion in value just gone, gone, gone. For an industry that always brags about innovation and decentralization, that’s a huge rate of failure.
But then again, easy come, easy go, part of the beauty and chaos of crypto is that any old 12 year old in a room with a little resourcing can launch their own token.
The simple fact is that most tokens fail, and most of those in a very short time frame...
Speculation Finds a New Home
Of course killing off millions of tokens hasn’t killed off speculation, the risk-on investors have just moved on.....
Now, prediction markets are the hot spot. Traders are betting on everything—elections, sports, economic data, even the future price of crypto itself.
Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are booming, with billions now being traded, or should we just say punted, daily.
And this confirms what a lot of us thought all along - most of that money going into crypto over the last decade wasn't coming from people motivated by the technology, it was just people trying to get rich quick!
And prediction markets take that urge and turn it into an actual system, basically they let you trade on almost anything that might happen.
And in a way this is crypto becoming more authentic to its punty-base...
Prediction markets run on blockchain. Smart contracts handle payouts automatically and keep things transparent, so you don’t need some middleman to trust, but it's all just in the name of having a punt!