a16z Crypto: The crypto industry has entered an era where “seeing is believing”

Author: Paul Cafiero, Head of Crypto Communications Partnerships at a16z

Compiled by: Shaw, Odaily Finance

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For decades, the technology industry has consistently won public recognition and external praise by coming up with an unending stream of novel ideas. The term “minimum viable product,” abbreviated as MVP, proposed by the startup community, happens to be identical to the initials of New York NBA star Jalen Brunson.

But over the past decade—especially in recent years—the technology industry has undergone a dramatic transformation: simply having an MVP, an ingenious idea, and a top-tier team is no longer enough to impress the general public. The crypto industry has been hit the hardest. Combined with regulatory inquiries and a large number of negative projects taking over the headlines, the public’s ability to screen and stay on guard has increased significantly. The constant noise across the industry has taught people to actively filter information.

When traditional finance (TradFi) institutions began taking the crypto space seriously—BlackRock issuing tokenized money market funds, Fidelity filing for crypto ETFs, and JPMorgan using its own blockchain to handle transaction settlement—the direction of industry discourse changed completely. People no longer just discuss what crypto is; they start asking: how can you truly earn genuine recognition within the industry?

We are in this brand-new stage right now. Industry communication rules have quietly been rewritten, and every practitioner must adapt.

Welcome to the “Show Me Era.”

What has changed, and why now?

In the early days of crypto, the core logic of industry communication was essentially “hype-for-the-future storytelling”: the vision itself was the product. Projects could go live based on nothing more than a whitepaper and tokens, and the media and the crypto community would proactively pay attention. Everyone was betting on the project’s potential for the future, rather than the results already delivered today. That entire logic has now completely failed.

At its root, this shift in communication logic has been brought about by three overlapping factors: first, long-standing market doubts about crypto technology—lasting for decades—have continued to ferment and deepen; second, traditional large financial institutions have moved into the crypto space at scale, no longer staying at the conceptual level but launching deployed products; third, the artificial intelligence industry seems to have exploded overnight, yet in reality it has been building up for decades and is now rolling out mature products for ordinary consumers in bulk.

Large institutions are no longer merely watching from the sidelines, or limiting related business to internal innovation departments. Instead, they are fully focused on scaled, real-world deployment: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has fully embraced the tokenization track, Fidelity has built out the full-stack infrastructure for custody and ETFs, JPMorgan has launched the Onyx blockchain network, and Franklin Templeton has launched on-chain money market funds.

These are no longer trial runs or experiments. They are mature, deployed products—supported by complete traditional finance compliance frameworks, an institutional customer base, and strong assets and liabilities (balance sheets).

Large-scale entry by traditional finance has raised the evaluation bar for what counts as “legitimate and trustworthy” in crypto. When the world’s largest asset management firms are tokenizing U.S. Treasuries, the media, partners, and the market’s requirements for proof of performance from quality projects naturally rise accordingly.

From the policy perspective, the industry has also formally entered mainstream view. Last year, the GENIUS Act passed successfully, and now the CLARITY Act—which fully regulates market structure—is about to be submitted for an all-senators vote in the Senate. After that, the external messaging framework for how projects communicate will also undergo further adjustments. If the CLARITY Act is enacted, founders will be able to disclose project construction details in a more detailed and specific way—something that was completely impossible in the past.

Whether or not the industry is prepared, crypto has already moved into maturity.

This directly reshapes the industry’s communication environment: instead of outsiders immediately asking, “What are you doing?”, the question has shifted to: “What have you already deployed? Who is actually using it?”

At the execution level, a purely compelling story narrative can no longer move the market. The market needs tangible, real proof.

A new system for validating real-world performance

The promotional lines that used to work—“We build product Y for group X; this track is highly meaningful”—now must be supplemented with a second layer. I call this second layer a performance-proofs validation system: a complete set of evidence that converts empty, abstract vision narratives into credible, concrete, delivered results.

What does a complete performance-proofs validation system include?

Partnerships with real, substantive delivery value—not just remaining at the negotiation stage. There should be genuine technical integrations, deployed on-chain contracts, and collaboration partners who are willing to publicly endorse the reasons for choosing you. In the past, a single cooperation announcement could be used as a substitute for progress; now, only the cooperation itself can justify and prove business growth—meaning that a leading institution, protocol, or platform chose you among many competitors, and you can clearly explain why.

Public, detailed, hard-core data. Publish real mainnet transaction volume (not just testnet data), active wallet addresses, revenue, and user retention curves. Don’t simply say “growth is rapid”—provide specific percentages, time horizons, and benchmark comparisons. As industry journalists become increasingly professional, they will verify the data themselves through on-chain data analysis platforms such as Dune and CoinMarketCap. If the data can’t stand up to on-chain verification, the project narrative will lose credibility as well.

Signals of true product-market fit. Clearly define the group of product users, and explain the core reasons why users—including customers from other industries—continue to retain.

I believe the strongest evidence for validating product-market fit is not a launch event, but the native community that forms spontaneously before PR campaigns begin, and continues to expand.

If a project’s most loyal users are only investors and token-holders who have financial incentives—that’s a risk-warning signal. These users exist due to financial incentives. But if users actively find the project through word of mouth, that is high-quality promotional material.

All effective corroboration comes from external endorsements that form spontaneously before PR campaigns: third-party institutional collaborations, security audits, and independent industry research. The most convincing proof has never been a self-staged performance by the project team—it’s third parties proactively recognizing the project’s value to the market.

Lessons for communication work at early-stage projects

In the early stage, when the product is not yet mature but the vision is very clear, teams are easily tempted to choose a promotion storyline built around grand visions and declarative statements. The original intent here is sincere, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

But in today’s market environment, that approach will only lead outsiders to believe the project carries high risk.

A more reliable communication approach is to plan the narrative sequence around outcomes that have already been deployed. Prioritize the data you are most confident in—even if the scale is not large. For example, 1,000 daily active users who have never heard of the founding team are far more convincing than a strategy backed by tens of millions of dollars. Likewise, a protocol reaching $50 million in trading volume within 90 days after launch is far better than talk like “once scaled, it will generate huge trading volume.”

At the same time, external promotional wording must be precise and restrained. “We build the future of payments” is merely a viewpoint/vision and does not count as performance-proof. “We will reduce cross-border settlement time from 3 days to 4 minutes, and three existing companies are already using it in production” is the kind of real-world, deployed evidence that truly supports the vision.

For dedicated communications teams and founders who personally handle external messaging, the core logic of execution is: narratives should be generated based on facts, not by forcing narratives to wrap around facts. This kind of content creation has higher barriers and demands greater rigor, but only this type of content can truly move the market—and it is especially true right now.

Long-term development perspective

The above does not mean that vision is no longer important. Mature crypto project communications always run two lines in parallel: one side shows existing delivered outcomes, while the other side explains the larger long-term value behind the product. The key difference lies in the narrative order and the share of content.

By “share,” in 2021 the industry could still accept a promotional mix of 80% vision and 20% delivered outcomes—but that ratio has now been completely reversed.

You can still publish whitepapers and industry manifestos, but that alone is far from enough. The vision still has value—it gives depth to delivered data and provides a long-term perspective for media and analysts. However, a grand vision must be supported by solid delivered outcomes in order to earn recognition from the market.

The “Show Me Era” is not a short-term downturn for the industry. Crypto audiences (media, institutions, and ordinary retail investors) are becoming more professional over time, and the evaluation criteria will remain permanently higher.

Builders who are serious about quality within the industry have already realized that this change is actually beneficial for projects that do real work. If you have genuine business growth, complete data, and heavyweight deployed partners, higher industry thresholds will automatically filter out market noise—making your project’s advantages stand out even more.

The key question is: is your communication strategy meant to showcase already deployed performance, or will you still only make future promises?