How they are killing crypto without anyone noticing.

I'll start with a list of highly credible projects, and ask you what they all have in common:

Aztec Connect: A privacy preserving system that attaches directly to Ethereum and inherits its full security guarantees

Fuel Labs: A modular execution layer for blazing fast settlement without having to solve for data availability

Celestia: A modular data availability layer that doesn't have to solve for execution

Anoma/Namada: A privacy preserving infrastructure for all kinds of asset exchange

Any idea what they have in common, apart from being serious projects with serious development milestones and lots of legitimate attention?

You can't buy them.

I've been in crypto since 2017, and while "ICO mania" is generally laughed at as the scam factory that it was, it was also the high water mark for retail (people like us) to actually invest in early stage crypto projects.

If someone put in the effort to sort the gems from the waste back in 2017, they could buy top 50 projects like ATOM and LINK at the absolute bottom, with only a small premium compared to presale buyers and "insiders".

But SEC pressure killed the ICO, and now the vast majority of legitimate projects do their early stage funding through seed rounds, open to VCs and insiders only, generally at a huge discount to the eventual retail price. Where, in 2017, an astute retail trader could get in at almost the bottom, now our first chance to buy is at many, many times what the insiders have bought for.

And that's if we're even allowed to buy in at all.

And this isn't an accident. One of the most ridiculous rules in all investing is the "Accredited Investor" rule, where you are only allowed access to early stage investing if you can prove an existing net worth over $1 million.

So someone who is already rich can buy tokens sooner, and cheaper, than people who aren't rich. What possible purpose does this serve except to systematically exclude the non-wealthy from the best opportunities?

With ICO mania it seemed, at least, that crypto was freeing people from this sort of nonsense. That if you put in the time and effort to find truly revolutionary technology, then you could get in very near the beginning. That opportunity is now dead, killed by regulation (to "protect investors", no doubt) and the result is that we simply aren't allowed to profit from being early.

It got so bad last bullrun that venture capital companies would literally not buy a single token after they were offered to the public. The VCs would buy them for pennies, sell them for dollars literally the moment they went on to exchanges, and then move on to the next one. The people who were "early" were the insiders who got access to the deals, and the people who were "late" were the people buying them off exchanges even on the very first day they were offered for sale to retail.

Given that the whole goal of being a retail trader is to see opportunities early and profit from them, this change has completely prevented even the most astute investor from being allowed to even participate, let alone make significant wealth.

There is no doubt, at this stage, that trust-minimised applications founded on smart contracts and DLT will be a global revolution in value exchange. But if all the profits from this revolution just go to the same club of insiders and rich people then it is safe to say that crypto has brutally failed in some of its most fundamental aspirations.

And it is happening with almost nobody talking about it.