Everybody is struggling right now.
I don’t think anyone can honestly say they’re loving the crypto world at the moment, and it’s pretty easy to understand why.

[IMAGE: https://img.leopedia.io/DQmSReNutfrmapcMXYc5ZieZJfcc8TDzbQEe7HzAwgfbN6c/image.png]

We know there are still teams building through the bear market, and credit to them for sticking with it, but it’s hard to see any real end in sight right now. The energy just isn’t there the way it used to be, and that makes everything feel heavier than it should.

Not that I’m going anywhere or changing my approach too much. I’m still consolidating, still accumulating, and still playing the long game. But there’s definitely a missing buzz from the industry. The excitement, the curiosity, the sense that something new and meaningful is always just around the corner — that’s been fading for a while now.

Nobody seems to be releasing anything genuinely interesting, and more and more projects are folding as time goes on. It feels like every week there’s another community going quiet, another roadmap getting pushed back, another team disappearing when the market stops being friendly. That kind of churn wears people down fast.

At this point, I think the safest bet is to stick with the tried and tested chains that have already been through multiple cycles and proven they can survive the chaos. People are slowly realizing that a lot of these new and shiny projects don’t actually have much behind the curtain. The marketing looks good, the promises sound big, but when you look closely there’s often very little substance there.

A big problem is that so many groups splintered off and chased the latest hype that a lot of the strong original communities got weakened and watered down. Users left one by one for greener pastures, chasing the next big thing, and in the process they dragged attention, liquidity, and momentum away from the places that actually had foundations.

The talent got diluted and the funding got diluted to the point where most alts have just fallen flat, with barely any signs of life from 99% of them, aside from a few notable exceptions. That’s what makes the current landscape feel so dead. It’s not that there isn’t any activity at all — it’s that the activity is scattered, thin, and rarely building toward anything lasting.

We’re stronger together, and it would be great to get some of our older users back, active again and building on chain. Right now everything here has slowed to a snail’s pace too, which only makes the whole situation feel more stuck. A healthy community creates energy, and without that energy it becomes hard to keep momentum going for long.

Even our few flagship projects feel stagnant at times, but at least they’re still surviving. And in this market, survival does count for something. Sometimes just staying alive long enough to see the next cycle is the win.

I don’t really know what the solution is unless we can grow the community enough to increase both the building and the funding. If there were an easy answer to that, somebody would have solved it somewhere over the last decade. It’s one of those problems everyone can identify, but nobody seems able to crack in a lasting way.

We’re hoping to help in some small way through our sports-based app @sportsblock, although it’s still early days for that one. There’s potential there, and I do see others building too, but it’s slow and so far it doesn’t feel like it’s reaching the next level. That’s not me trying to be negative — it’s just the reality of where things are at right now.

And really, this isn’t just a Hive problem. It’s our problem too, and it’s a crypto problem more broadly. Until people stop chasing get-rich-quick schemes and start trying to build real utility into chains, we’re going to keep fighting an uphill battle as an industry. Speculation can only carry things so far before people start asking what the actual use case is.

People are barely talking about life-changing technology anymore. They’re mostly talking about prices, pumps, and whether something is going to 10x, which says a lot about where the headspace is right now. That shift tells you the focus has moved away from building and toward gambling, and that’s not a healthy place for any ecosystem to be.

Hopefully we can do better here, and hopefully projects like alterra and keychain can help bring us to more places and more people. We need more builders, more users, and more real reasons for people to stay.