The Fast and Slow of Web3.
Written by: Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
Crypto has slowed down.
This is my feeling after attending the Hong Kong conference 'BUIDL 2025' yesterday. After the "strong push-back feeling" in Q2 2024 and the "intense weightlessness" in Q1 2025, especially after a series of negative events in March, both project teams and practitioners are trying to slow down and start thinking about doing things correctly, albeit more slowly.
"Recently, I want to work and find a promising crypto niche track to focus on, rather than just trading," said a Web3 product manager who previously focused on trading. Such cases seem to be becoming more common. With market liquidity scarce and opportunities for hundred or thousand-fold coins diminishing, more practitioners are thinking about how to build the industry step by step, rather than being immersed in finding overnight wealth opportunities in a fast-paced PVP environment.
At the 'BUIDL 2025' summit, some Web3 industry leaders who continue to seek and explore industry directions shared their judgments about the future of the industry: which tracks are truly worth continuously building.
RWA Will Go Through Three Stages
HashKey Group founder Xiao Feng is optimistic about the future prospects of RWA, believing it will go through three stages: tokenization of legal currency, tokenization of financial assets, and tokenization of physical assets.
At the 'BUIDL 2025' summit, Xiao Feng said: The first application scenario of RWA was USDT, which existed in 2015 and took ten years to achieve huge success. In 2024, stablecoin trading volume reached $16 trillion. He said the global financial asset trading volume is approximately $300 trillion, and if the stablecoin market could reach $30 trillion in 2025, stablecoins would account for 10% of global financial asset trading volume.
The first stage of RWA, "stablecoins", has been highly successful. Xiao Feng believes the second stage of RWA, "tokenization of financial assets", is beginning to take the stage, with a key event being BlackRock's tokenization of US Treasury bonds in 2024, accelerating this trend.
While Xiao Feng is optimistic about "tokenization of financial assets", he also believes that the third stage of RWA, "tokenization of physical assets", will be more difficult to implement on a large scale and will require more time.
Solana is Trying to Bring 5.5 Billion People into the Same Capital Market
"Solana is competing with traditional exchanges like Nasdaq," said Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu, who also attended the 'BUIDL 2025' summit and delivered a keynote speech titled 'Solana: Shaping the Internet Capital Market'.
Lily Liu expressed hope that blockchains like Solana can become global financial infrastructure, expanding user access to finance, and bringing 5.5 billion people into the same financial liquidity through the internet and cryptocurrency, just as most of the global population is currently on the same internet.
In 2024, Solana is undoubtedly the best-performing public chain in the crypto industry. Taking Pump.fun (a meme launch platform) on Solana as an example, it successfully activated more crypto users on-chain and gradually shifted crypto users from centralized exchanges to decentralized exchanges.
In the past year, Pump.fun created over 7 million tokens, generating $500 million in revenue, while the decentralized ecosystem projects around Pump.fun also developed, with DEX earning nearly $1 billion and MEV (validators) earning about $1.5 billion.
Besides meme, Solana is also actively promoting PayFi and Depin tracks. At this 'BUIDL 2025' conference, Lily Liu wore a gold ring made by a popular Depin project in the Solana ecosystem.
Crypto is Still Undergoing Systematic Innovation
If RWA, Depin, and PayFi are narratives waiting to emerge, another feeling after attending this 'BUIDL 2025' conference is that Crypto is still undergoing systematic innovation.
For instance, Hyperliquid, currently the hottest "on-chain contract platform", despite recent FUD, is undoubtedly challenging the market share of centralized exchanges, making their founders feel a sense of crisis. Similarly, Pump.fun on Solana has, to some extent, moved more crypto users from centralized platforms to decentralized ones.
This is one of the systematic innovation cases in this cycle.
Additionally, at the 'BUIDL 2025' conference, I also saw U-card service providers like DCS actively promoting more users to connect cryptocurrency with the traditional world.
It's noticeable that many practitioners around me have started using crypto payment cards from companies like Infini, Bitget, and SafePal. These U-cards not only support ATM withdrawals but can also be linked to Alipay and WeChat. Many crypto users can now directly spend cryptocurrency in the real world.
Although U-cards have existed for three years, in the past six months, with more exchanges and Web3 companies entering the market, they have been further popularized.
Crypto is undergoing slow but steady changes in technology and systems.
The Fast and Slow of Crypto
Crypto has two systems: one fast, and one slow.
Most of the time, people experience the fast side of Crypto, like the "strong push-back feeling" from the Q4 2024 market, or the "intense weightlessness" from the Q1 2025 market - sensations that often appear and disappear quickly.
When Crypto is in fast mode, people often overlook its gradual systematic progress. This systematic progress includes further decentralization of the industry, more people treating Crypto as a lifestyle, and Crypto becoming embedded in mainstream systems as a new institution.
Meme is fast, U-cards, RWA, and DEX popularization are slow; traders are fast, holders and builders are slow. The charm of Crypto is allowing two seemingly opposing states to coexist, and when one state reaches its peak, it will shift to the other.
Last August, when we held the 'Foresight 2024' conference, my feeling was that Crypto was entering a state of ultra-rapid change. Eight months later, at 'BUIDL 2025', my feeling is that Crypto is slowing down, and people are returning to innovation and construction.
