Karla Barker 
The Current State of Crypto Development
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. There’s something happening in crypto that feels different from previous cycles. Maybe it’s just me, but conversations with auditing companies keep revealing the same pattern: fewer builders are seeking smart contract audits.
That’s not because they’re skipping due diligence. It’s because there just aren’t as many new decentralized applications being built. Developers and founders who want to create useful applications are either waiting for better conditions or leaving the space entirely. They’re not interested in building simple financial clones or tokenized funds that already exist.
The Funding Problem
Here’s the thing that really bothers me. There’s very little support or funding for utility applications. These are the projects that are harder to build and usually take more time. Unless something promises a 1000x return in a short window through some DeFi scheme, it won’t get funded.
This puts blockchain-savvy founders in an impossible position from the start. They have great ideas, but the money isn’t there for the kind of work that could actually change things.
Instead, investments are focused on pure short-term profit chasing. Memecoins, insider knowledge manipulation, multi-layer DeFi protocols without enough transparency, over-leveraged trading. Where money goes, attention follows, which is why we’re hearing less about actual blockchain use cases.
The Middlemen Return
What’s most frustrating is that cryptocurrency was invented to eliminate financial oligopolies. The whole point was to democratize access and create a new era of the internet without gatekeepers.
But we’ve allowed manipulative middlemen to reinvent themselves. They’ve come back with a slight change of form, sometimes even positioning themselves as potential ‘saviors’ of Web3. These middlemen and their financial products have introduced harmful complexity to what were supposed to be transparent markets.
They’ve unlocked a new level of greed and theft. Consider recent liquidations where retail investors are still paying the price while those with power negotiate their own recoveries. We don’t even know the full impact of what happened.
What Crypto Could Be
Web3 got its name because blockchain represents the next generation of the internet. The technology itself is remarkable. Used correctly, blockchain could improve how different parties work together without barriers. Combined with AI, it could reshape the world as much as the internet did.
But instead, we’re stuck watching trading leverages, DeFi liquidations, and a small number of people making outsized profits while others suffer. Crypto hasn’t fulfilled its promise of matching the radical transformation of the World Wide Web.
I keep thinking about a scene from The Big Short. Mark Baum says fraud and short-sighted thinking have never worked in fifteen thousand years of history. He’s right. Every cent of profit gained from squeezing the crypto ecosystem only drives builders away and halts progress.
For those of us who want to use crypto to make the world better, we need to call out this behavior. It’s short-sighted, selfish greed. We need to save this industry by focusing on real utility building. We need to put innovative applications for the next billion users at the center of our attention.
There’s still fight left in us. We should use it to champion utility over speculation, before it’s too late.