Who Decides the Direction of Technology?

For a year now, I’ve been trying to both inform about and understand the direction of Web3 and blockchain projects in this newsletter, without focusing too much on prices or markets.

But the recent developments make it clear that even if I love discussing the tech and philosophy, there’s no escaping the market and price side of things.

Even though Bitcoin prices hit new “all-time highs,” the prices of “altcoins” tied to thousands of different projects have been steadily dropping for a few years now, aside from some periodic spikes. This affects not just small investors but also how this ecosystem and technology take shape. How, you ask?

Well, a few years back, VCs were investing in games, metaverse, DeFi, tokenization, and other Web3 projects. But lately, they’ve shifted their focus to stablecoin infrastructure. Since 2022, crypto venture funding has cooled off, and speculative Web3 projects or NFTs have been labeled “riskier/very risky.” Meanwhile, the total transaction volume of “stablecoins,” which are pegged to the USD, reached $33 trillion in 2025, growing by 72% annually. In recent months, KAST raised $80 million, Rain $250 million, and Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion. Altcoin prices have been falling for years, regardless of team, idea, technology, or community. It seems the winners of this round are the coins whose prices don’t fall: stablecoins.

A similar story is unfolding in the mining world. The average cost to produce one Bitcoin rose to about $80,000 last quarter. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is trading in the $68,000-$70,000 range. Miners are losing money, forcing them to pivot. The needed infrastructure is quite similar, servers, data centers, electricity, but now it’s being used for AI. Public miners have signed over $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts. They’re selling their Bitcoins to fund this transition, and by the end of the year, some mining companies will get 70% of their revenue from AI.

EthCC kicked off today in Cannes, one of the biggest gatherings in the Ethereum ecosystem. Developers, infrastructure builders, and communities came together, and on the first day, Gnosis and Zisk announced the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) with support from the Ethereum Foundation.

The reason was clear: “Ethereum doesn’t have a scaling problem. It has a fragmentation problem. Every new L2 becomes a separate island with its own liquidity pool and bridge.”

Currently, about $40 billion is locked across more than 20 L2 networks, but they can’t communicate directly without bridges. EEZ aims to change that: smart contracts on different networks will be able to interact within a single transaction, without needing a bridge.

So far, these stories reflect the blockchain world looking for returns, cash flow/liquidity, or revenue in different directions. But there’s another side to this story.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned prediction markets, speculative markets where you can profit from predictions on anything from election results to the weather. ICE, the owner of the NYSE, just invested another $600 million in Polymarket, one of the largest of these markets, on top of their initial investment in October 2025. It seems ICE sees this platform not as a speculative betting tool, but as a source of financial intelligence. They’re integrating probability data from prediction markets into institutional finance terminals and are well aware that there’s no liquidity issue in this market.

In other words, speculative markets don’t have to chase liquidity/cash flow; liquidity flows to them. From both the corporate world and end users.

I’ve tried to share a few recent stories reflecting the times we’re in, but the question they bring to mind is shared:

Even if you bring the best idea and build the most solid technical infrastructure, can you find liquidity in these times? Probably not easily. On the other hand, a project that solves no problem but is in the right place at the right time can reach incredible heights.

The promise of blockchain and Web3 was “financial freedom.” A system without intermediaries, decentralized, with equal access for everyone. But when you look at end-user tendencies, the picture is a bit different: speculative markets, leveraged trades, quick and high profit expectations. Demand comes from there, liquidity flows there, and technology evolves to meet that demand.

Even if I say I won’t write or talk about prices, I end up here: technology is shaped by price, and price by human behavior and nature. This cycle decides where technology will go, how it will develop, and who it will reach. Should we say “technology comes first, adoption follows,” or “money comes first, technology follows it”?

Where does Web3 still stand between these two?