Blockchain Capital investor says crypto compressed market cycles, with AI now showing similar patterns

Blockchain Capital investor Jonah Burian said crypto has accelerated the speed of market cycles, giving early-stage companies liquidity through tokens while exposing market behavior in public. In his view, those lessons now offer a useful lens for AI investing. He argued that outsized winners tend to trigger copycat capital formation and FOMO: after Bitcoin reached a trillion-dollar scale, Ethereum and Solana helped convince investors that more large outcomes were possible, which fed the boom in alt-L1 funding. Burian said a similar setup is emerging in AI, where OpenAI and Anthropic are moving toward trillion-dollar scale and newer labs are being valued like lottery tickets. He contrasted the two markets by noting that crypto token prices were formed in public trading venues, while AI valuations are now developing in opaque, semi-liquid secondary markets. Burian also drew a parallel on value capture, saying blockspace eventually became abundant and commoditized, with applications taking most of the value. He suggested AI models could face the same pressure, pushing profits toward applications and hardware instead. He added that periods of frenzy often lead financial capital to overfund infrastructure, and said the history of crypto and alt-L1 should be enough to justify skepticism toward current AI lab bets, unless AGI arrives.