Blockchain Burnout

While technologies continue to evolve and crypto still promises an exciting future, it comes with the baggage of an exhausting past and present

- Sharan Sanil

My first cryptocurrency investment (if we can M call it that) happened seven years ago, as an old friend and I put together our meagre savings in the hopes of riding an exciting new tech wave that we barely understood. At the time, cryptocurrency was certainly popular, but nowhere near as inescapable as it is today, with the ashes of dead NFT projects and dozens of blockchain startups piled up alongside crypto's 14-year-long journey - sad reminders of the giddy optimism that the tech world held before the pandemic struck, especially with younger, bright-eyed early adopters.

I was one of the many who cashed their chips out in 2021, having been an investor, crypto writer and general tech enthusiast for years. At the time, I thought that the looming threat of a crash was why I stepped away from the blockchain world (good job on my part). Today, things seem a bit more complex when surveying the aftermath. Blockchain, after all, is an exponentially complicated technology that continues to evolve year-on-year- and if I started feeling overwhelmed during the pandemic, what did actual crypto entrepreneurs and developers feel?

For 25-year-old Shlok Gupta, reality set in by the time it was late 2022, when the marketing and operations lead ended a long streak of work for Devfolio, a SaaS platform for hackathons. "We essentially put developers in a space for two days, or should I say 48 hours they basically don't sleep. All they do is eat and build something on the blockchain - usually dApps (decentralised apps) and usecase scenarios. We've also held the biggest Ethereum hackathon in the world picking 2,000 out of 25,000 developers for two days with 100 thousand dollars at stake."