Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley published a post on X drawing a direct comparison between the current crypto market and the history of the internet boom. His argument centers on the shift from an early phase in which many ideas attract capital because they sound plausible, to a later phase in which only a smaller group of projects or companies continue to grow after proving their merits. In Horsley’s view, that same transition is now taking place in crypto.
Horsley wrote that in the 1990s, the internet was new, and almost every idea seemed plausible. He said hundreds of companies reached valuations between $500 million and $1 billion on the back of possibility. The point of the comparison is not that every internet company ultimately succeeded, but that the novelty of the technology made a wide range of business ideas appear investable during the early expansion of the sector.
The post was published at 4:37 on June 21, 2026. The X page showed 13,000 views and a prompt to “Read 15 replies.” Other visible interaction-related numbers on the page included 15, 14, 116 and 13. Horsley did not name any specific crypto token, protocol, company or sector in the post. Instead, he framed the discussion around industry cycles, the durability of winners, and the way markets distinguish between broad optimism and demonstrated value.
Horsley then turned to the early 2000s, when the optimism around the internet had burst. He wrote that hundreds of companies no longer had a bid. According to his post, the market environment changed from one in which many companies benefited from broad enthusiasm to one in which fewer companies that had proved their merits were able to flourish. This is the central historical parallel he used to discuss crypto.
In his description of the post-bubble internet period, Horsley emphasized that the companies which continued to succeed did so because they had demonstrable merits. Because their success was based on qualities that could be shown and validated, he wrote, those companies ran for longer and became bigger than the companies of the prior cycle. This distinction between possibility and proof is the key idea behind his assessment of the crypto market.
Horsley stated that this transition is underway in crypto. The post implies a movement away from an environment where many projects can command attention because the technology is new, toward one where a narrower set of projects survives and expands because their merits are visible. He did not provide a list of criteria for judging those merits, nor did he identify which projects he believes fit the description. The post remained a broad market-cycle comparison rather than a project-by-project analysis.
His conclusion was concise: there will be fewer winners. At the same time, he argued that the winners will be riding demonstrable merits. In the context of his internet analogy, this means that the next stage of crypto would not be defined by the sheer number of projects receiving support, but by the ability of a smaller group to show why they deserve to keep growing over time.
Horsley ended by saying that these winners will be bigger and will run for longer than people expect. The full message therefore links three ideas: the internet’s early period of widespread plausibility, the collapse of broad optimism in the early 2000s, and the later success of fewer companies with proven value. By applying that pattern to crypto, the Bitwise CEO presented a view in which the sector’s long-term leaders become more concentrated, larger in scale, and longer-lived than the market’s earlier cycle of broad experimentation.