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The market is still brutal for much of the ecosystem, but this month's headlines are a reminder of how far we've come:
Three things crypto finally got
2021 bets vs. now
A note from us
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📆 Events
DC - policymakers went to crypto side events like Injective Summit for the GENIUS Act's 1st anniversary - despite missing the deadline for stablecoin rules
Cryptographers will gather in Santa Barbara at IACR Crypto 2026
We shipped a new feature comparing side-event counts year over year. Token2049 will have some serious conference competition 👀
The three substitutes in 2021 are now real
💰 Assets
In 2021, you could buy Tesla without owning Tesla shares on Mirror Protocol. mTSLA went to zero with Terra. Today, DTCC just announced using tokenized securities in real production trades with Goldman Sachs and 30+ other firms.
📣 Distribution
🏛️ Regulation
In 2021 the institutional path into crypto was messy, and FTX became the offshore “credible” shortcut. Today Circle’s final OCC approval marks the opposite model - credibility is now granted by real regulation.
“Failing is Common, Trying is Rare”
The class of 2021 that survived changed its thesis
Ondo went from selling DeFi yield in 2021 to tokenizing Treasuries and stocks, now among the largest tokenized securities platforms onchain. Turns out PMF was in the asset itself, not the yield wrapper.
Livepeer built decentralized video, Render built GPU rendering, and Core Scientific mined bitcoin. All built crypto infra for a customer that turned out to be AI: AI is now 60% of Livepeer's revenue, and Core Scientific now leases most of its capacity to AI data centers.
The names had to catch up too
In the 2017 ICO era:
"Coin": meant you were issuing a tradeable token
"Block": meant you understood the ledger
(Long Island Iced Tea Corp renamed itself Long Blockchain Corp to boost its stock price.)
By 2021, the room moved on to “Labs” and “DAO”.
2024 meme
By 2026, both backfired. "Coin" and "Block" are compliance triggers, "Labs" and "DAO" are reasons an LP won't reply.
So companies started rebranding.
Worldcoin became World
MakerDAO became Sky
Crypto became digital assets (this year alone our records show “63” digital asset events).
“Crypto” became so unpopular that even in online dating, "finance bros" are perceived more desirable than "crypto bros." This was the exact opposite in 2022.
"Stablecoin" is next. The word describes the problem it solved - volatility, not the payment rail it became.
GENIUS Act calls them payment stablecoins
Banks say tokenized deposits
EU/MiCA say e-money tokens
Even inside crypto, some argue Tether, Circle and Ethena have nothing in common (a payment tool vs a packaged hedge fund). To the outside world, they’re all stablecoins.
a16z thinks the word may stick anyway, the same way "horsepower" outlived the engine it measured and the way you still "dial" a number and "roll down" a window.
One thing is for sure: An industry that outgrows its language is one that is still growing.
One more rebrand
Crypto Nomads is now Mira.
The work stays the same, we’re just adulting with the rest of the industry and saying goodbye to Pepe memes.
Crypto is still our core audience - which is increasingly at the intersection of TradFi & AI.
The newsletter reaches 90k industry professionals, opened at nearly double the industry average, from decision makers at institutions like BlackRock to protocol teams and developers. 50k people use our platform, where we continue building one of the largest structured datasets covering the companies, events, and people shaping where frontier finance and tech is going next.
If you're interested in reaching this audience you can always reply to this email. Thank you for supporting us 🙏
Member Updates
From our private community
We’re hiring AI Transformation Lead on behalf of a European based crypto client
Lukasz, co-founder of ETHWarsaw is now available after wrapping up 2 years at Mimic
Metapost is hosting an HSC Conference in Ho Chi Minh, 15 Aug
About Us
Mira is the discovery platform for digital finance and frontier tech - events, companies, jobs, and the people building it
We also run a private community of crypto founders and builders
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