everyone hates crypto, what now?
Crypto is in a weird spot right now. Actually, weird is generous. Everyone hates it, which is far worse than indifference. And this isn't just a content creator problem. If you're building a product and the word 'crypto' is attached to it, that's a net negative now. The word itself has become a filter.
YouTube views for crypto are at 5-year lows, back to January 2021 levels, before the last bull run even started.
X just nerfed crypto twitter. Nikita Bier, head of product, basically said CT has so many bots that they just throttled the whole thing. Not specific accounts… the whole thing.
This isn't a bear market thing. This is a "people actively don't want to see this because we totally cooked it" thing.
The uncomfortable reality
The uncomfortable reality is that not many people are interested in crypto content. Which is strange, because the tech is more interesting than it's ever been. Privacy tech, AI verification, dollar debasement, actual useful stuff. But the word 'crypto' carries too much baggage.
I think it comes down to two things:
Reputation. To most people, crypto means gambling. Casinos. Rug pulls. That friend who won't shut up about some coin. The industry has done this to itself, honestly. Years of scams and get-rich-quick nonsense means the default assumption is "this is probably a scam" - even when it's not.
It's boring. A lot of usable crypto tech right now is… banking. Payments. Trading infrastructure. What normal person wants to bring up stablecoins to their friends in their downtime? These aren't things people learn about for fun. Going to work at a bank or optimising your money management is a chore for most people. It sits in the 'utility' category of their brain. Not the 'interesting' category.
I was talking to a friend this week who has a YouTube channel, over a million subscribers. He recently made a video about the social media ban in Australia and touched on why data and privacy matters.
He knows he can't go deeper into 'crypto' though. Even though the tech is genuinely important, especially around AI safety and verification, he knows most people would instantly see it as a scam. Doesn't matter if it's not. The word 'crypto' anywhere near it and you've lost them.
We saw this recently when Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, put out a post about AI content flooding feeds. His solution was cryptographic signatures to verify real content - fingerprinting authentic media at capture. The reaction wasn't "oh that's interesting" - it was immediate skepticism.
Crypto creators are already pivoting to self-aware slop instead, and immediately performing better.
The tech could genuinely help solve real problems. But nobody wants to hear about it.
So what do you do from here?
I don't have a clean answer. But I think if you're making content or building products with 'crypto' tech, you have to distance yourself from the word 'crypto' entirely. Talk about the tech indirectly, what it actually achieves, the problems it solves. The tech itself doesn't really matter, it can be invisible - it's ultimately about what it can do for the world or humans using it.
Crypto as a word is dead. It was brutally murdered. The tech though, is more alive than ever. Which is a strange place to be - the technology is finally doing interesting things, and the worst thing you can do is tell people about it.
I wrote this over a coffee after doom-scrolling CT and realising half my timeline is complaining about reach. More about me here > aaronnev.com