Hokkaido, Japan, at the westernmost end of the Niseko mountain range, Iwanai Resort, Multicoin co-founder Kyle Samani stands under a snow-covered ridge, wearing a helmet and carrying a snowboard.

This is Kyle Samani's most recent tweet after announcing his departure from Multicoin.

A few days ago, he had just deleted a tweet: "Cryptocurrency is not as interesting as many (including myself) once imagined. I used to believe in the Web3 vision and dApps, but I no longer do. Blockchain is essentially just an asset ledger."

Although it was quickly deleted, many people still saw it.

Later, Kyle provided a more moderate explanation in an open letter: "This is a bittersweet moment. Multicoin has been one of the most important and rewarding experiences of my life. But I also look forward to taking a break to explore new technological frontiers."

Another co-founder of Multicoin, Tushar Jain, wrote in a letter to LPs: "Kyle's interests have expanded from cryptocurrency to emerging technology fields such as AI, longevity tech, and robotics. He hopes to take some time to systematically explore these directions."

Kyle Samani's departure seems to have made the industry clearly aware for the first time: even those who were among the earliest advocates of Web3 are beginning to waver.

The Golden Age of FTX and Multicoin

In the crypto VC circle, Kyle Samani is one of the investors who loves to write long articles, research reports, open letters, and trend analyses, one after another. The "three mega theses" proposed by him and the Multicoin team have influenced a generation of practitioners' understanding of the intrinsic value of cryptocurrency.

Many people know that Multicoin is one of the staunchest supporters of the Solana ecosystem, but what many do not know is that Multicoin was not originally a "Solana-related" institution.

From 2017 to 2018, Multicoin's core bet was actually on EOS. That year, EOS was packaged as a "performance killer" and "Ethereum killer," focusing on high TPS, low latency, and suitability for large-scale applications. Multicoin was also one of its staunchest supporters, heavily investing and deeply participating in ecosystem development.

But the outcome is well known: governance failure, hollowing out of the ecosystem, loss of developers, and financialization. EOS essentially declared failure.

For Multicoin, this was a setback close to a "faith-level" defeat. If they continued to bet wrong on the next generation of public chains, their institution would essentially be marginalized by the market.

So after the collapse of EOS, Multicoin began to cautiously search for "the next chain that can truly run a financial system."

From 2019 to 2020, FTX developed very quickly. But SBF faced a real problem: Ethereum was too slow and too expensive. Matching, clearing, derivatives, on-chain settlement—all were not feasible. He needed a public chain with extremely high TPS, extremely low latency, suitable for high-frequency financial systems, and capable of handling exchange-level traffic.

At this time, Kyle was already systematically researching Solana, and Solana's characteristics happened to match SBF's needs.

One night, Kyle called SBF directly in the middle of the night. The two talked for a long time. The core of the conversation was just one question: Can Solana handle real-scale transactions?

This call is seen by many in the industry as a turning point in Solana's fate.

What happened next was quite "Wall Street." SBF did not fully trust Kyle. He chose to verify for himself, so they initiated a large number of spam transactions on Solana as a form of aggressive stress testing to see if Solana would collapse.

The result was: Solana held up.

What followed is also well known: FTX fully entered the market. FTX/Alameda bought a large amount of SOL, invested in Solana ecosystem projects, provided liquidity, made markets, and listed related assets. Multicoin continued to increase its holdings, endorse externally, conduct research and promotion, and hold institutional roadshows, etc.

The early core projects of the Solana ecosystem were almost all intertwined with FTX/Alameda and Multicoin, forming a de facto alliance. They created momentum together, provided blood transfusions together, pumped prices together, and built the ecosystem together.

With their help, Solana rose to become a top public chain, FTX gradually established itself as the largest exchange, and Multicoin also became a top VC, reaching the peak together, mutually achieving success, and many still reminisce about that golden period.

In the post-FTX era, Multicoin is still firmly holding onto SOL, rebuilding its narrative.

Even now, after leaving, Kyle Samani still has a stake in SOL, emphasizing that he remains optimistic about cryptocurrency, especially Solana, and plans to maintain personal involvement. After all, as a co-founder of Multicoin, he managed about $5.9 billion in assets, but his most successful label has always been: the person who first bet on Solana.

Now, he continues to serve as the chairman of Forward Industries. This company holds the largest SOL treasury in the market. He also wrote on X: "I hope to increase my stake in FWDI, which essentially means increasing my exposure to SOL. I am still super bullish on SOL and super bullish on cryptocurrency."

Even after stepping away, he still stands with Solana.

Multicoin also resembles a "narrative factory"

Founded in 2017, Multicoin set a very rare positioning for itself—Thesis-driven VC.

This means that Multicoin is more like a "narrative factory."

Identifying structural opportunities in advance, packaging those opportunities into trends through papers, and then using capital to turn trends into reality. Web3, DePIN, PayFi, data sovereignty, AI+Crypto, privacy… many mainstream narratives we have seen over the years can almost always be traced back to Multicoin's influence.

If we were to say which narrative has been the most successful for Multicoin over the years, this editor believes the answer is DePIN.

Starting in 2019, Multicoin repeatedly discussed a question: Why must blockchain only serve finance? Can it directly transform the infrastructure of the real world? Thus, they proposed the embryonic form of DePIN: using tokens to incentivize the construction of physical networks.

Turning real-world assets into on-chain production materials.

DePIN's popularity is largely not due to technological breakthroughs, but because: Multicoin articulated it well.

In blogs, summits, and research reports, they continuously output: what projects count as DePIN; what projects are fake DePIN; how to judge sustainability; how to avoid Ponzi-like structures. Gradually, the entire industry began to discuss issues in their way.

Subsequently, more and more capital began to enter the field.

Helium, Hivemapper, GEODNET… one after another, phenomenal projects emerged in the Solana ecosystem. Helium deployed over 600,000 hotspot nodes within 30 months, directly competing with traditional telecom networks. Hivemapper reconstructed the mapping system using crowdsourced devices. These projects became the showcase for DePIN.

By 2025-2026, DePIN had become a standard track for institutions. Grayscale included it in their research reports, and the market size was estimated to reach tens of billions of dollars. And the earliest systematic investors were Multicoin.

In addition to DePIN, Multicoin has repeatedly emphasized a longer-term proposition over the years: Who owns the data? In the Web2 world, data belongs to platforms, users are merely products, and banks, tech giants, and credit agencies control the flow of information. Multicoin's core judgment is: if Web3 is meaningful, it must be reflected at the data layer. Individuals must regain control over identity, privacy, behavioral data, and credit information. Otherwise, the so-called "decentralization" is merely swapping servers. They have laid out a large number of privacy computing, encryption protocol, and data market projects around this direction, such as Zama, etc.

Did we fail?

Just as Kyle stepped away, another tweet was being repeatedly shared in the circle.

From Vitalik.

He used an unusually introspective tone while discussing the Ethereum L2 ecosystem: "The progress of L2 entering Stage 2 has been much slower and harder than we expected. Meanwhile, L1 itself continues to expand."

Another translation of this statement could be: "Sorry, we failed." Not a technical failure, but a narrative failure.

Multicoin was one of the best narrative designers in this system. They seriously, systematically, and rigorously constructed an entire worldview of Web3. But today, even Kyle himself has begun to say: blockchain may essentially just be an asset ledger.

What can blockchain really do? A decade has passed, and although we have not found the correct answer, fortunately, we have at least ruled out one wrong answer.

Kyle's departure marks the end of an era, but we may also be on the verge of a new era.

Because at the same time, there are still some people, including Vitalik, who are steadfast in this industry.

Over the past decade, Bitcoin has experienced countless moments that "seemed to be the end": Mt. Gox, the 94 ban, the ICO crash, 312, FTX… each time, the market declared it dead; each time, it slowly crawled back.

Narratives may fail, cycles may end, and capital may withdraw.

But as long as there are still people willing to bet their time on technology and their reputation on the system, this industry will not truly go to zero.

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