• Despite a series of high-profile crashes in the crypto industry, the founders of Web3 remain bullish.
  • Insider spoke to eight founders about why their confidence in cryptocurrency hasn’t wavered.
  • They said they believed that Web3 can make the global economy more accessible and enhance creativity.

It was far from a banner year for crypto markets in 2022, to put it mildly.

In all, the collapse of Three Arrows Capital, Voyager Digital, Celsius, FTX, Alameda Research, and BlockFi wiped out more than $20 billion in assets. And the bad news has not stopped coming. Another cryptocurrency lender, Genesis, filed for bankruptcy on January 19.

Yet little of this seems to faze people looking to build crypto and Web3 businesses in this environment, despite some VCs reconsidering their level of investment in crypto and Web3.

Countless founders have insisted that cryptocurrencies have received too much attention for their excesses and explosions and not enough for their potential. Among the touted, albeit very nascent and not fully tested, use cases: giving artists and musicians a share of secondary sales, enabling ultra-fast global payments, tracking and offsetting carbon emissions, and creating a safer way to access Online services.

In recent months, there has been the constant refrain: “It’s still early.” The implosion of FTX and the arrest of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, now considered the symbol of bad behavior in crypto, are not an indictment of the industry, the sources said, but of financial regulation, or the lack thereof. The promises of Web3 and blockchain technologies are quite different from speculative trading in a variety of cryptocurrencies, they said.

“The story most people knew about cryptocurrencies was: ‘I buy a token, the token goes up, I make money,’” said Omoju Miller, founder and CEO of Web3 Fimio. “We need a new narrative.”

Amid all the carnage, it’s easy to wonder: Are these people delusional? So we decided to ask a few founders why they remain so bullish on cryptocurrency even after last year’s turmoil. This is what they said.

Quotations have been condensed for length and clarity.