I gave crypto seven years of my life. I am done pretending it still deserves the next seven.
That sentence is uncomfortable to write because crypto was never a side interest for me. I did not buy a few coins, post a chart, and call myself a founder. I built my career inside it.
I entered the industry in 2017 as Head of APAC at a blockchain venture studio. In November that year, I founded Alpha Blockchain, a blockchain consulting and advisory company. Bitcoin was approaching its first mainstream frenzy. Every week brought a new protocol, white paper, exchange, fund, or token model. Most people were trying to understand what blockchain was. I was already working with companies that wanted to build on it.
In 2018, crypto went through one of its biggest bear markets. I stuck with it, founded RoseonLabs that year, and stayed through the market crash and later the FTX collapse in 2022. The easy version of this story would skip over the timing. Crypto had already fallen hard. Attention disappeared. Money tightened. Many of the people who had arrived during the run-up left as quickly as they came.
I stayed.
I spent the next five years and eight months building Roseon. We built Roseon App and Roseon Exchange around crypto and DeFi. Together, they reached more than 350,000 users. I worked across product, distribution, partnerships, and the daily grind of turning an idea into software that people could download and use.
I saw the industry from several angles: founder, operator, consultant, and product person. I sat through the cycles. I watched new categories get announced as the future, attract capital, copy each other, and fade when the market stopped rewarding the story.
I invested years into crypto that I cannot get back.
I do not regret them.
Crypto taught me how to ship under pressure. It taught me what happens when money moves faster than product quality. It taught me how communities form, how incentives distort behavior, and how quickly a market can confuse attention with demand. Most of all, it taught me to look for the person using the product after the excitement leaves.
For me, crypto is dead
I am not saying Bitcoin will go to zero. I am not saying blockchains will disappear. Prices can rise again. Traders will trade. Stablecoins may keep finding practical uses. None of that changes my decision.
The crypto industry I joined was built around the belief that useful products would eventually catch up with the money and attention. After seven years, I saw too much energy flow in the opposite direction. Products became wrappers around speculation. Communities became distribution channels for tokens. Founders learned to manage announcements and listings before they learned to retain users.
There were serious teams. There still are. But they have spent years fighting the incentives of the category itself.
By April 2024, when my time running RoseonLabs ended, I was tired of building products whose value was constantly measured against a market cycle. A useful release could disappear under a red candle. A weak product could look brilliant during a bull run. The feedback loop was broken.
AI gave me a different feeling
I could build something in the morning and use it that afternoon. I could automate a task that had wasted hours every week. I could put an agent in front of a business and watch it answer a customer. The value did not depend on a token, a listing, or somebody else buying after me. The product either did the work or it did not.
That directness pulled me in.
In December 2024, I started freelancing and helped an early-stage AI automation company build several AI automation products. Since then, my work has focused on AI automation, product, and GTM systems. I use tools such as Claude and Codex to build workflows, route tasks, reduce operating costs, and help small teams ship with fewer handoffs.
I now build AI automation products, agents, and GTM systems. The format can change, but my standard is simple: can a person use this today, and does it remove work from their plate?
AI has its own garbage. There are thin wrappers, fake demos, inflated claims, and founders chasing whatever model name is getting attention. I recognize those patterns because I watched them play out in crypto.
The difference is that AI already gives ordinary businesses practical output. It can answer support questions, qualify a lead, draft a campaign, search company knowledge, write code, review documents, and connect steps that used to require a person copying information between tools. The useful part is present now. Nobody needs to wait for a future network effect to test it.
Sunk cost can look a lot like loyalty
Leaving crypto was not a clean intellectual decision. It felt personal. I had built a company there. I knew the language, the people, the conferences, and the unwritten rules. Starting again meant giving up the comfort of being experienced in a category and becoming a student in another one.
That was still easier than forcing myself to believe.
When you have spent years on something, walking away feels like admitting those years were wasted. So you keep going. You adjust the pitch. You wait for the next cycle. You tell yourself the market will finally reward the people who stayed.
I stopped waiting.
The years were not wasted. They paid for the judgment I use now: what hype does to a product team, why a large user count does not excuse a weak reason to return, and how dangerous it gets when a founder starts serving the market story instead of the customer.
Acquisition without retention is rented success.
Those lessons came from crypto. The next products are being built with AI.
Why this led to BrainSite
That standard, can a person use this today, is the same test BrainSite has to pass. BrainSite turns a static website or link-in-bio page into an AI agent with memory, one that talks to visitors, answers real questions, and moves a conversation toward a booking or a sale instead of a click that goes nowhere.
It is the direct, unglamorous opposite of what pulled me out of crypto: no token, no listing, no cycle to ride, just whether the agent on the page actually helps the person using it, today, in that conversation.
Crypto can keep its charts, cycles, and promises. I want to build software that earns its place through the work it completes.
I gave crypto seven years. It does not get the eighth.
