Opinion: Markus Levin, co-founder of Xyo
The crypto community often experiences periods of increased anxiety. Market slump is often caused by counterproductive, emotionally driven events rather than fundamental issues, creating a great connection between price action and the actual progress being made within the industry by the companies within it. What is often not noticed is how much development actually occurs during these recessions. While market movements have attracted most attention, the team is building faster and more intentionally behind the scenes than ever before. The focus moves from price guesses to actual execution. Growth occurs during a sluggish period. This is a necessary stage for projects that thrive in unstable industries. They are focused on refinement in technology and business and driving the next wave of progress.
As a result, there is a disconnect between online emotions and conversations between leaders in the blockchain industry. For builders and project leaders, the atmosphere is determination, not destiny.
Regulators are on board
One of the most promising developments is the acceleration momentum of regulatory policies. Many European companies have applied for MICA licenses in preparation for regulatory updates. There is also a significant policy shift under new US leadership as the SEC retreats from several well-known crypto enforcement measures.
The gap between emotions and reality reminds us that prices are indicators of lagging behind. The sale is caused by uncertainty regarding tariff announcements and background activities such as interest rates. With the number of active developers still stable, almost doubled last year, the number of active developers is stable, which speaks of virtually universal optimism among industry leaders. It’s an incredible jump in just one year.
From hype to substance
Maturity means that teams are thoughtfully constructed, governments are seriously involved in the law, and users demand better UX and actual usefulness. There are established patterns in the industry. Market revisions wipe out hype and encourage focus. The last bear market created breakthroughs in Defi, NFTS and zero-knowledge technology. This time we’re talking about real infrastructure, regulatory platforms, and next-generation scalability.
What appears during these periods tend to be invisible but durable. In many cases, teams that remain active are teams with clear models, ample runways and willingness to adapt. These are periods of time to learn whether the system being built can handle actual requests. One of the most promising frontiers is at the intersection of AI and blockchain, within the most ubiquitous, large-scale language models. However, AI is as good as the data being trained.
AI systems are evolving rapidly, but their foundations are distorted. They are built primarily on data scrapped from digital first countries in the Northern Hemisphere, and dominates global media production and internet use. This not only amplifies Western and East Asian perspectives, as well as widely spoken languages such as English and Mandarin, but also allows little room for the data needed from smaller populations.
A Web3 Technologies report states that 60% of Tier-One Media on the Internet are in English. Among these media outlets, the New York Times, which sued Openai on the basis of copyright infringement. The publication claims that copyrighted data was used to train Openai’s LLM model.
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It is impossible to know the full range of global imbalances in the data that creates AI outputs. Such allegations and the results provided when using AI tools suggest an urgent need for solutions.
It’s even worse. If AI systems are trained on narrow, incomplete datasets, the results can exclude billions of dollars from the benefits of emerging technologies. As IBM emphasizes, data bias is not just a technical problem, it is a human issue that brings real-world consequences to healthcare, finance, agriculture, and more.
It’s become common to use AI data every day. Receive individual Google search results, Adobe builds AI into industry-standard graphics and video software, and uses AI assistants such as Gemini, Grok, and ChatGpt to develop ideas that represent themselves. All of these tools are affected by overwhelming bias towards the center of the bell curve within the dataset, and are unable to access or address common use cases.
A popular example illustrates this problem. Until recently, the image generator was unable to create a full wine glass. No matter what prompts were provided, the wine glass was full on the edges, exceeding the capabilities of all known generation AI software. They had to update their dataset to fix this comical issue. This revealed a much more serious problem.
Distributed data provides solutions. Globally incentive systems like Depins allow participation of otherwise underserved populations, allowing valuable data provided to come online. This will improve the services of everyone, make it easier for smaller global communities to access commerce and make it easier to access other parts of the world. It also allows small data creators to monetize their data rather than abandoning it to the tech giants.
Where do you go from here?
The crypto industry is entering a new stage. A more productive and sustainable phase. Expect to see rapid growth in work infrastructure, platforms and applications, welcoming regulations and projects for knowledgeable consumers that respect the time and money of users.
Opportunities within the crypto space are changing, but not shrinking. Our opportunities grow as we learn from things that have not been going well over the last few years. They take time to develop, but successful builders focus on long-term incremental changes and healthy business practices rather than chasing trends or short-term profits.
The true momentum of progress is stronger than ever, and in such an era, when you feel like no one is watching, the foundation for the future is laid.
Opinion: Markus Levin, co-founder of Xyo.
This article is for general informational purposes and is not intended to be considered legal or investment advice, and should not be done. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or express Cointregraph’s views and opinions.
