A Top Crypto VC Just Declared Web3 Dead. The Eulogy Is More Useful Than the Dream Was.

One of crypto's most influential investors just buried the word that launched a thousand pitch decks. On 1 June, Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani posted that "Web3 is dead. All we have is DeFi and DePIN," and the uncomfortable part isn't that he said it. It's that the people arguing back mostly did so with examples that proved his point.

He is not a hater. He runs a crypto fund and remains, in his words, "mega long" the space. That makes the obituary harder to wave away.

What he actually claimed

Samani's argument, made in response to a wider debate kicked off by StarkWare's Eli Ben-Sasson, was narrow and brutal. He once believed in the Web3 vision of decentralized apps replacing the consumer internet. He no longer does. Blockchains, he now says, are "essentially asset ledgers" — extraordinary at moving and pricing value, unremarkable at almost everything else.

So the two areas with proven, durable demand are decentralized finance, where the asset ledger is the product, and decentralized physical infrastructure, where tokens coordinate real-world hardware. Everything else — the decentralized social networks, the on-chain everything, the metaverse land — he files under a label whose time has passed.

This is a confession, not a prediction

The reason the post landed is that it reads less like a forecast and more like an admission. Web3 was the promise that blockchains would remake industries far beyond money. Five years on, most of that has simply not materialized. Decentralized social never dented the incumbents. Web3 gaming produced a handful of niche hits and a graveyard of token launches that died the moment the emissions stopped.

When the loudest defense of a category is "but a few projects survived," the category is the problem.

The honest version is smaller and more valuable

Here is where the eulogy becomes useful rather than depressing. "Asset ledger" sounds like a demotion. It is actually the most defensible thing crypto has ever been able to say about itself.

A ledger that anyone can write to, that settles globally, that prices risk in the open and clears in seconds, is not a small idea dressed down. It is a large idea finally described in language that survives contact with reality. The mistake of the Web3 era was insisting the technology had to be good at everything to be worth anything.

DeFi was always the part that worked

Strip the speculation away and DeFi has quietly become infrastructure. Lending, market-making, stable-value transfer and on-chain treasuries kept growing through every cycle, including the ugly ones. It did this because it solved a problem people actually had — moving and earning on capital without asking permission — rather than a problem a deck insisted they should have.

That is the tell. The surviving categories are the ones where the asset ledger does the work, not the ones where it was bolted onto a use case that a database already handled fine.

DePIN is the same insight pointed at hardware

Decentralized physical infrastructure — wireless coverage, mapping, compute, energy — works for the identical reason. The token isn't decoration. It is the coordination mechanism that gets thousands of strangers to deploy real equipment before any single operator could justify the capital. The chain prices and settles the contributions. Again: an asset ledger, doing the one thing asset ledgers do well.

The examples are concrete rather than theoretical. Helium pays people to run wireless coverage. Hivemapper rewards drivers for building a maps dataset that would otherwise take a Google-sized budget. Render coordinates idle GPUs into rentable compute. In each, the hard part is not the blockchain — it is bootstrapping a two-sided market for physical capacity with no central buyer. The token solves the cold-start problem that crushes most infrastructure businesses in their first year. Take the token away and you have a worse version of an idea that needs scale to function at all.

That is a genuinely new capability, not a decentralized copy of something that already existed. It is also, tellingly, financial at its core: paying contributors, pricing supply, settling rewards. The "physical" in DePIN is real, but the engine is still the ledger.

Notice what's missing from both winners. Neither needed users to care that a blockchain was involved. That, more than any market-cap chart, is the line between what lasted and what didn't.

Why this is good for the people still building

A label dying is not a market dying. Samani stepped back from Multicoin's daily operations this year but remains chairman of the Solana-focused treasury vehicle Forward Industries and still calls himself a long-term bull. The capital isn't leaving. The story is just getting honest.

And honesty changes what you build. If blockchains are asset ledgers, then the durable businesses are the ones that help assets get created, distributed and managed properly — not the ones chasing a consumer-app dream that never converted. A token still needs to launch without insiders dumping on day one. Liquidity still needs to be locked credibly so a community can trust it, the kind of provable commitment that tools like Team Finance exist to enforce. A launch still needs structure rather than vibes, which is the entire reason a TrustSwap Launchpad is more useful in a sober market than a frothy one.

The frothy market rewarded narrative. The asset-ledger market rewards plumbing. That is a better market to build in, even if it photographs worse.

The strongest objection, kept honest

The fair pushback is that "Web3 is dead" is partly a Solana partisan talking his book — a bet that monolithic, finance-and-hardware-first chains beat the modular, app-first vision his rivals sell. That's true, and worth holding onto. Declaring a paradigm dead is also a convenient way to declare your paradigm the survivor.

But a self-interested claim can still be correct. The test isn't Samani's motive. It's whether you can name a single non-financial, non-infrastructure Web3 category that reached durable mainstream scale. After five years and untold billions, that the question is hard to answer is the entire argument.

Web3 promised to swallow the internet. What it delivered was a very good ledger. The teams that stop mourning the first thing and start compounding the second are the ones who will still be here when the next narrative arrives to be buried.