Chaos! Goldman Sachs and Citadel elites are rushing into crypto, the scariest signal in the bear market: the real winners are quietly lying in wait!

Crypto bear markets are like a mirror that shows who’s only in it for price—pushing speculators out. But there’s a signal most people are overlooking: the founders rushing into this market now have the strongest backgrounds and capabilities in four cycles.

Don’t be fooled by the “talent exodus” narrative. Yes, $BTC has fallen by half from the $126k peak in October last year; market sentiment is fear, and most capital and attention have shifted toward AI—last year AI absorbed about $211 billion, almost half of all risk capital, while blockchain had only about $20 billion. Artemis data shows that blockchain code submission volume has declined by about 75% since the beginning of 2025. A batch of the most visible players in the industry have announced a shift to AI.

But you need to look deeper. Most of the developers who left were people who only came in during the previous bull market; the majority of code being written now comes from more experienced contributors. Artemis interprets this as consolidation rather than collapse. Talent hasn’t disappeared either—GitHub added about 36 million new developers last year, and total submissions across the platform grew by about 25%, almost all flowing to AI.

The truly interesting question has narrowed to two tracks: AI and fintech. And the standard of founders choosing to use blockchain to solve these problems is the highest I’ve seen across four cycles. The market has matured to the point where serious operators can treat it as a career. The data is ironclad:

In 2025, the value settled on stablecoin chains surpassed the total of Visa and Mastercard combined—about $3.3 trillion. Of that, roughly 60% is already business-to-business, including corporate treasury, cross-border settlement, and supplier payments—real economic activity, no longer just speculation. Nearly 90% of interviewed financial institutions are using or piloting stablecoins. The size of U.S. Treasuries held by stablecoin issuers has surpassed Germany or Saudi Arabia. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and BNY Mellon have all launched tokenization products. Tokenized real-world assets on public chains have broken $30 billion, growing more than 400% since the beginning of 2025.

The track is being laid out synchronously worldwide: the GENIUS Act provides a federal framework for U.S. stablecoins, Europe’s MiCA creates licenses usable across the entire EU, and Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UAE have taken a proactive stance politically and on the regulatory front. BCG predicts that by the 2030s, the size of tokenized assets will reach $1.6 trillion. When a serious version of a problem arrives, serious founders arrive with it.

The clearest proof is who is showing up. The truly hard problems in blockchain now are institutional-grade financial infrastructure—and these are exactly the issues that the best operators in traditional finance have been solving throughout their professional careers. Nathan Allman left Goldman Sachs’ digital assets team to found Ondo, where he now manages a product suite of about $2.6 billion, moving Treasuries and other assets on-chain. Ed Felten went from being a Princeton professor and White House staffer to co-founding Offchain Labs and building Arbitrum. And right here in our own company, my partner Franklin Bi also came from JPMorgan Onyx. Founders walking into our meeting rooms now are leaving Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Stripe, and Block—not to hype narratives, but because that truly difficult problem has finally become an interesting one.

When meeting founders in a market like this, I look at four things.

First, deep domain expertise. You’ve lived through the market, not just studied maps. In a bear market, buyers only show up to the truly important meetings, and technical depth consistently crushes polished pitches. Ed Felten spent a lifetime on the hardest problems in systems and security before co-founding Offchain Labs and building Arbitrum. We led their seed round precisely because this depth let the team see the scaling problem clearly while the market was still arguing.

Second, high proactivity. Clearly show to mature, skeptical people your judgment about where the market is going—until they want to build on top of you. When Paul Frambot was 20, he founded Morpho in Paris based on a contrarian bet: DeFi would win as infrastructure, not another application. It’s a brand and institution embedding layer, not something you build yourself. That’s why Coinbase’s crypto-collateralized loans run on Morpho, Robinhood’s on-chain yield products are built on it, and Apollo’s credit uses the same rails. He didn’t win anyone with marketing—he simply saw the shape of the market earlier.

Third, an unfair network of connections. The right relationships let you move faster than anyone else; a warm introduction beats any cold start. In September 2018, at the bottom of the previous bear market, Jeremy Allaire launched USDC, and from day one it was tied to a partnership with Coinbase, which became its distribution engine. It took nearly two years for the market to turn—Circle kept building throughout, making USDC one of the two major dollar stablecoins that on-chain economic activity currently relies on for settlement. What an unfair network buys you is the space to keep delivering through winter, so that when the market catches up, the track is already yours. We’ve been investors in Circle all the way.

Fourth, obsession. When things go bad, people leave; those with obsession cross cycles and stay behind, persisting long before it pays off—the kind of belief that kept Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Adam Back holding onto digital cash for decades even without a market and without money. The real-world version of this is Alchemy. Nikil Viswanathan and Joe Lau shut down a viral consumer app, built a blockchain data product, and found that the underlying infrastructure was the real prize. Since 2017, every cycle they’ve built Alchemy as the industry’s default developer platform. We support them because they’ll never stop. It’s a trait you can’t see on a resume, yet it’s the most important.

To founders already in the room: belief is fuel for winter. In a bull market, price is the product, and momentum gets founders’ work done. Capital is cheaper, hiring is easier, and each release gets attention—regardless of whether it deserves it. In a bear market, the product is truly the product. People chasing price are flushed out; only the truly resilient builders remain. A bear market strips away all comfortable momentum, and the only thing that can keep pushing founders forward is belief. Founder-market fit is, at its core, belief—and belief is an observable output. A founder whose understanding reaches that depth will keep building even when tokens drop 50% and headlines all turn to AI, because they can see the end of the market that currently can’t yet be priced.

This is also the least crowded time. When capital and attention leave, the noise leaves too: fewer teams chase the same idea, less competition among engineers, and no one is left around to hype up prices for you. Winter gives you what bull markets never do—quiet time to build when no one is watching. And capital is actually still there, which surprises many. Most blockchain funds raise money in bull markets, so the money promised at the top gets invested straight through the winter. The next playbook is straightforward: use that belief to hire and retain, shift toward the true product-market fit in your space, and complete the next round of fundraising as the market accelerates into the next cycle. The only thing worth adjusting is runway—aim to raise close to three years instead of the usual 18 to 24 months, because winter is longer than anyone expects, and only people who plan early are still standing when the turn comes. This also benefits us. Once valuation settles and your holdings go up, it’s the best entry timing.

If you’re still inside Goldman Sachs, Citadel, or Stripe, this section is written specifically for you. The truly hard problem in digital assets is no longer building a smart consumer app. It’s institutional-grade financial infrastructure: settlement, lending, custody, compliance—the underlying machines you already work on every day, just not as flashy. For years, this skill set has been misaligned with digital assets. Now it’s the whole game. You don’t need to have been here for years, and you don’t need to catch the bottom. You need to understand the market better than crypto natives do—and when it’s quiet enough in that space to build, start. A bear market isn’t risk; it’s a testing ground. Tourists leave, the noise leaves, and it’s actually easier. Founder-market fit is what compounds even when prices stop rising, and your fit with this specific problem might be the strongest among the market today.

Defining the founders of the next cycle isn’t about waiting for it to arrive. They’re being activated quietly by people who know their market too well to be scared away by token prices. Every truly important category in crypto is built this way—by those naturally suited to build it, built in a winter that sends everyone else back home. The real problem has never been whether the market will come back. The question is whether, when it does, you’ll still be standing in the market you were born to win.

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