Travis Kling, the founder of I kigai Asset Management, is widely known in the crypto for his two articles "There is no excuse for what these things can or will do in the future" and "Financial Nihilism". He recently published a long article The Twitter threads , describing that the cryptocurrency field is experiencing a common "quiet exit" phenomenon, has received more than 300,000 views and was forwarded by major media.
Among them, he talked about that he did not believe that the cryptocurrency market was still in its early stages, which attracted a response from Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
Travis Kling: We're not in the early days
Participants in the cryptocurrency market often hear the slogan we're early (we're in the early stages), but Travis Kling believes that it's actually not too early and we should stop saying this. The reasons he gave from the perspective of "capital investment and market size" are:
Bitcoin now has a market capitalization of $1 trillion, with almost half of Wall Street holding it, and the rest of the cryptocurrencies also have a market capitalization of $1 trillion. Tether holds more U.S. Treasury bonds than even Germany. Over the past four years, more than $20 billion in venture capital (VC) has poured into this area. We are no longer in the early stages.
Travis Kling stresses that stop comparing cryptocurrencies to the “internet of the late 1990s” and look at what happened back then. Cryptocurrencies are not the Internet of the late 1990s. Bitcoin and stablecoins have both found their market niche, while other cryptocurrencies are lost in the sea. At best they are solutions looking for a problem, and at worst they are heartless and cruel scams.
Regarding Travis's point of view, Zeng Jiajun, a Web3 industry expert with over 10,000 tracks on X, zjj.eth, put forward a different point of view to refute . He cited the following reasons in terms of "technological development" and believed that we are still in the early stages:
- The Ethereum “merger” happened only two years ago;
- Layer2 Arbitrum was launched three years ago, while blob only came online this year;
- zkvm/evm has become a hot topic in the past four years;
- The same is true for account abstraction.
In addition, zjj.eth also gave another interpretation of Travis’ reasons. First of all, in terms of Bitcoin, he said that the dominance of BTC (that is, the market share of Bitcoin) is greater than 50%. This is the reason why we are in the early stage. "Cryptocurrency" is not only a "currency", but also a "blockchain".
In addition, regarding the investment of US$20 billion into the crypto, zjj.eth stated that although the total amount is large, it is relatively small. In the past four years, venture capital investment in the field of artificial intelligence has increased 10 times (more than US$200 billion); and VC investment in key infrastructure in the crypto is also very limited.
Vitalik: L2 cost reduction opens a new chapter in encryption
A comment from zjj.eth unexpectedly elicited a response from Vitalik Buterin, who also mentioned that a key point in our early stages is that L2 is finally becoming affordable. He said:
I've been saying since about 2020 (or even earlier) that the crypto space, outside of high-value DeFi, can only really grow when transaction fees come down.
In fact, this goal was not actually achieved until March of this year.
Vitalik's words emphasized that only when transaction fees become low enough, more widespread applications will be possible, which was achieved after the Dencun upgrade introduced Blob in March this year. Therefore, he believes that crypto technology and ecosystem are still in the early stages of development.
Vitalik: Other key technologies
Vitalik further stated that if I had to choose the second and third key technologies that will open a new chapter in encryption, it would be:
- ZK-SNARKs is finally approaching the maturity stage and has application cases (zupass, railway, 0xbow, rarimo, etc.)
- Account abstraction
Vitalik added that ZK-email (and similar centralized zk-wrappers) is particularly important, bridging the two points above.
