Hello,
For almost nine months of 2025, every Monday on Token Dispatch opened with our Bitcoin macro edition. Price, on-chain flows, ETF prints, what the miners were doing and where the industry was in the crypto cycle. It seemed like the most obvious thing to write about. If you were a crypto publication, you would lead with Bitcoin, just as a market wrap leads with the index.
Then, one Monday, we shipped without it. We have now gone almost nine months without a Bitcoin macro column. I didn’t think much of it at the time. But now, when I look back, it helps me acknowledge how far the industry we operate in has come.
For most of crypto’s life, people cared about just one question: what is Bitcoin doing? It made sense then. But crypto has outgrown its connection to BTC price charts and ETF flows. When I hear crypto today, I think of how it is building a better financial world, running stable businesses on existing or new infrastructure, or turning into a new version of fintech that improves the way we transact or move money.
Many great innovations have taken this road in the past. The smartphone went through this when it stopped being measured against the phone call. The internet did too. That’s how crypto is graduating, too.
We have been writing a lot lately at Token Dispatch about the convergence of crypto and fintech. So, we deemed it timely to publish this guest op-ed, in which Nikshep argues that crypto no longer needs Bitcoin. He explains why Bitcoin lost two jobs this year and why it bodes well for the larger industry. Nikshep invests and builds at the intersection of AI and crypto. He has previously worked with Kalshi and Coinbase.
On to Nikshep’s story,
Prathik
AI took its job as the market’s risk trade. The dollar took its job as crypto’s money. And the thing quietly tying a fragmenting, multi-chain economy together isn’t Bitcoin anymore. This is the most bullish thing that’s happened to crypto in years — and almost nobody is framing it right.
Bitcoin broke below $70,000 this week, down roughly 45% from its October high, and the timeline filled with tombstones. Record ETF outflows. The longest redemption streak since the funds launched. “Digital gold” that somehow forgot how to be gold while actual gold ripped 89% and blew past $5,000.
They’re mourning the wrong thing.
Because while Bitcoin bled, an on-chain exchange most people have never opened did more trading volume last year than Coinbase. A prediction market hit a $20 billion valuation, printing a $365 million fee run-rate. A privacy coin everyone wrote off ran 70% in a week — going up while Bitcoin went sideways. And a network you’ve probably underrated made it possible to move value privately across any chain without having to buy its token.
Crypto isn’t dying with Bitcoin. Crypto stopped needing Bitcoin.
That sentence sounds bearish. It’s the opposite. What’s actually happening is a coming-of-age: crypto is graduating from a single-asset momentum casino, where every coin was just leveraged Bitcoin-beta, into a real, dollar-denominated economy where businesses live or die by their own fundamentals, and where a new connective layer, not Bitcoin, holds the whole thing together.
Bitcoin lost two jobs this year. Here’s who took them, and here’s what’s being built in the space it left behind.
Job one: AI ate the risk capital
Bitcoin has no cash flow — no earnings, no dividend, no coupon. Its price is almost purely a function of how much money is hunting for risk and how willing people are to take it. That makes it a liquidity sponge: it swells when money is loose, gets wrung out when money is tight. In 2026, one rival is wringing it dry.
AI infrastructure spending is heading toward $700–830 billion this year, about half of the entire US investment-grade bond market, on its way to $7 trillion by 2030. It’s roughly 5% of US GDP and has recently added more to American growth than consumer spending. Nvidia alone is ~8% of the S&P 500. This isn’t a sector competing for capital. It’s a gravity well bending the price of capital for everyone.
It starves Bitcoin through three doors at once.
It took the story. Bitcoin’s deepest pitch was “the asymmetric bet on the future.” AI offered a better version — one with real revenue, demand it can’t build fast enough, and government backing — bought through the index you already own. Allocators now lump Bitcoin in with the most speculative tech; its correlation with unprofitable “story” stocks hit the 97th percentile. When two things share a risk bucket, and one suddenly has earnings, money rotates. That’s the outflow streak in a sentence.
It took the capital. The build-out is increasingly debt-financed — hyperscaler bond issuance already past all of last year, private credit to AI over $200 billion. When the best borrowers on earth flood the market with paper, capital gets absorbed from the top down, long before it reaches the speculative frontier where Bitcoin lives.
It took the rate cut. AI is physically inflationary — electricity and water up ~5%, memory up double digits. That helps pin inflation near 3.8%, which keeps a hawkish Fed at 3.50–3.75% and markets pricing in zero cuts this year. So AI doesn’t just outbid Bitcoin for capital; it manufactures the high-rate regime where liquidity can’t reach Bitcoin anyway. It suppresses it twice.
And then it got physical. AI and Bitcoin mining are the same business — turning electricity into compute, fighting over identical megawatts. AI won because a watt is worth far more in an Nvidia rack than a hashing rig. The average public miner spent ~$80,000 to make one bitcoin last quarter while bitcoin traded near $70,000 — a $19,000 loss per coin. So miners are defecting to the predator: over $70 billion in AI/HPC contracts have been signed, with listed miners on track to generate up to 70% of revenue from AI by year-end. Core Scientific is converting a 300-megawatt bitcoin site into AI data centres as part of a $10.2 billion deal. Riot leased to AMD and sold its bitcoin to buy the land. They’re dumping treasuries to fund the pivot — and they’re the same firms that secure the network.
Here’s why this is structural, not a dip. Compare it to the threat everyone fears: quantum computing. A powerful enough quantum machine could crack Bitcoin’s cryptography in minutes, maybe by 2029. Terrifying — but quantum attacks the machine, and you can change the machine: post-quantum standards are finalised, the migration soft forks are drafted, the roadmap is years. Quantum is a deadline, not a death sentence. You patch the lock. AI attacks what you can’t patch — the reasons to own Bitcoin, the capital that prices it, the power that secures it. There’s no soft fork for “something better took your narrative, your money, and your electricity.” Job one, gone.
Job two: the dollar replaced Bitcoin as crypto’s money
This is the part nobody connects, and it’s the keystone.
For most of crypto’s history, Bitcoin was the reserve asset — the on-ramp and the base pair. Fiat became Bitcoin; Bitcoin became everything else. Every coin was quoted in BTC. Every inflow hit Bitcoin first. That gravitational role is why alts used to rise and fall with it.
The stablecoin cut that cord. USDC just flipped Tether in transaction volume for the first time since 2019. Annual stablecoin volume crossed $30 trillion. The on-ramp is now fiat → USDC → whatever you want, and Bitcoin is nowhere in that path. When Polymarket rebuilt its exchange this spring, it launched its own dollar — Polymarket USD, backed 1:1 by USDC. Hyperliquid settles in dollars. The dollar has become, in one analyst’s phrase, money beneath app-level money — the reserve collateral under everything, with each app stamping its own label on top.
So when the market turns risk-off, the dominance charts show Bitcoin’s share falling while stablecoin share rises. Money isn’t fleeing crypto. It’s rotating into the dollar — inside crypto. You no longer have to hold Bitcoin to “be in crypto.” The dollar does that job now. Bitcoin can fall forever and never get a bid from on-chain activity, because on-chain activity runs on dollars. Job two, gone.
What’s Thriving without BTC: Real Businesses
Strip Bitcoin out and look at what people actually use. These aren’t lottery tickets waiting for a BTC pump. They’re businesses.
Hyperliquid is the proof that should end the “crypto is dying” conversation. An on-chain exchange that trades like Binance — deep books, fast fills, self-custody — it did roughly $2.6 trillion in volume last year, more than Coinbase’s $1.4 trillion, generating $0.8–1.3 billion in annualised revenue. It routes 97% of fees into buying its own token on the open market — about $1.3 billion so far, ~7% of market cap a year, four to five times Ethereum’s burn rate, fourteen times Solana’s. No VC. A community airdrop and a buyback funded entirely by people using the thing. Its demand driver — traders trading — is bidirectional and BTC-agnostic. Volume can climb while Bitcoin falls.
Polymarket is the second: a $20 billion valuation, $25–30 billion in annual volume, a ~$365 million fee run rate, ~150,000 daily users (2.5x in five months), its own dollar, and a token coming. Its product is betting on elections, sports, and world events. None of that demand needs Bitcoin to go up.
These are now valued like companies: by revenue, users, and multiples. That is what a maturing market looks like.
The new differentiator: privacy — and two ways to get it
If Bitcoin’s transparent, surveilled ledger was the old default, privacy is the new premium. Something you can only get on-chain -- sovereign, untraceable money. But there are two completely different ways to buy it, and the difference is the whole point.
Privacy you own. That’s Zcash. ZEC ran ~70% in a week toward a ~$10 billion cap, up over 4,500% from its 2024 low — decoupled from Bitcoin, as its own move while BTC sat flat. It’s backed by mechanics, not hype: shielded supply has crossed 30% of all ZEC (from ~11% a year ago), and shielded coins tend to stay shielded, shrinking float as demand rises. The regulatory pressure that was supposed to kill privacy coins is the thing fueling them. Robinhood listed it; Grayscale filed the first privacy-coin spot ETF. Privacy went from use case to thesis.
But ZEC is still a coin you buy and a chain you move to. Which brings us to the more important model.
Privacy you use — anywhere. That’s NEAR, and it’s the most underrated idea in this entire shift.
NEAR isn’t asking you to buy a privacy coin or migrate your assets. Through chain signatures, a single NEAR account can sign native transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana — real BTC, real ETH, no bridges, no wrapped tokens — controlled by a decentralised MPC network. Layer on confidential intents, and you can move value across any chain privately, with counterparties and routing hidden, executed through a private shard. You keep your assets on your chains and get usable privacy as a layer on top.
That’s a categorically bigger claim than any single privacy coin. You don’t need ZEC. You don’t need to leave Ethereum or Solana or Bitcoin itself. Privacy stops being an asset you hold and becomes a property of how you transact, everywhere at once.
The unifying layer for an economy Bitcoin no longer dictates
Step back and look at the shape of the thing. The crypto economy isn’t consolidating — it’s expanding and fragmenting. Dozens of chains. A dollar base layer underneath all of them. And now a new class of participant entirely: AI agents that hold credentials, call APIs, and move money on their own.
A sprawling, multi-chain, agent-inhabited economy needs connective tissue. For a decade, that connector was Bitcoin — the reserve asset everything routed through. That role is now vacant. And the thing filling it isn’t another store of value. It’s a coordination-and-privacy layer: sign anything on any chain, settle in dollars, transact without broadcasting your every move, and let agents do the same.
NEAR is positioning to be that layer. It already lets agents pay each other in USDC with the counterparties hidden, runs confidential compute inside hardware enclaves nobody — not even NEAR — can see into, and turns its signing network into a key-management service for the agent economy. It’s usable privacy and cross-chain control for humans and machines, without forcing anyone onto a single chain or coin.
The consumer face of the same shift is Venice — a privacy-first, uncensored AI app with actual web2 users who just want private AI, wrapped in a token economy where staking VVV earns a share of inference via locking VVV and minting DIEM, tokens that represent a dollar a day of compute in perpetuity. It’s burned over 40% of its supply through usage-funded buybacks. Its demand curve is the number of people using AI. Bitcoin’s price is not an input. The token price and product growth clearly show it’s decoupling.
This is the new centre of gravity. Not a coin. A layer — and an economy that hangs off it, along with real businesses driving real value.
The Reframe
Put it together, and it resolves cleanly. The dollar is the cash. Protocol tokens — HYPE, POLY, ZEC, NEAR, VVV — are the equities. Coordination and privacy layers are the infrastructure connecting it all. And Bitcoin? Bitcoin is one node. The “digital gold” node is currently out of favour, because AI took the macro trade, gold took the safe-haven trade, and the dollar took the reserve trade.
For ten years, the only question in crypto was “what is Bitcoin doing?” because everything was Bitcoin-beta. That era is over. The new question is the one you’d ask about any company: does it have revenue, users, and a token that actually captures the value it creates?
The Takeaway
Stop watching Bitcoin to read crypto’s health. You’re staring at the wrong instrument.
Watch revenue. Watch users. Watch which networks are becoming the rails everything else runs on — the layers that let value move across any chain, privately, settled in dollars, usable by humans and agents alike.
Bitcoin lost two jobs this year. AI took the macro. The dollar took the money. And the connective tissue of everything left is being built by protocols Bitcoin can no longer dictate.
Bitcoin breaking $70,000 isn’t the end of crypto.
It’s the moment crypto stopped needing it.
Not financial advice. Small-cap narrative tokens are exactly where the gap between “great network” and “the token captures the value” is widest — and where the losses concentrate. Do your own work.
P.S. This piece was originally published here.
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