Here’s one BIG disconnect with crypto valuations today, catching many teams off guard looking to TGE or raise via ICO

Most of these projects were started years ago before the advent of Claude Code and AI-native dev tooling

Why is this important?

Because these teams needed to raise larger amounts of funding to build out bigger dev teams, and now are compelled to show a return to investors with a higher ICO/TGE val

But the market isn’t stupid - it knows that building almost anything today should cost a fraction of what it took just 1-2 years ago

So that app you built with a 20 person dev team on $10m of investor funding could prob be done today with a handful of people and $1-2m of funding

Since markets rapidly close inefficiency gaps, they don’t want to value your app at $100m when something similar could be built today for $1m unless you have a truly unique moat

This is why valuations need to come down by a lot, and unfortunately teams that are caught in this transition period to pure AI-native development will have to reset their expectations, and those of their investors

The same thing happened in SaaS with the introduction of no/low code tools, but 1) it took much longer for those tools to mature, and 2) still often left big gaps that required traditional dev teams to address

What’s happening now with Claude Code and AI-native dev tools is unprecedented in terms of speed and scale that many are caught off guard

Welcome to 2026