Being early is overrated. Being useful is not

I will be turning 24 in a few months.

I started programming in my sophomore year. It was 2021. The crypto boom was at its peak. Bitcoin touched $69k. Like many others, I got pulled in.

For the next three years, I worked deeply in crypto. Hackathons, global events, startups, even a few experiments of my own. My lecture attendance probably hit an all-time low. I genuinely loved the tech. Cryptography. Distributed systems. ZK. And parts of the community. But something felt off.

That feeling became more clear now when i look back at things. Crypto is still a small community. Real product adoption is limited. And most projects don't solve large, real-world problems. A lot of energy goes into solving problems that don't exist (at least not on a large scale).

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had believed this lie: "Being early is better than being useful." In reality, majority of public crypto adoption mostly revolves around two things today: Trading and prediction markets.

For the last year, I have been playing seriously with AI and LLMs. The contrast was immediate.

AI isn't just exciting tech. Reality is people actually use it. Businesses adopt it. It solves real problems, at scale, and generates revenue by doing so. For the first time, I could clearly see the path from code to user to impact. The feeling of building something and actually using it everyday myself was unmatched. It's addicting.

Crypto is still a great market and i still believe in the idea of blockchains. But impact-wise, AI feels fundamentally different. This isn't a pivot announcement. It's just an honest update to my younger self.

Being early doesn't matter. Being useful does.