At Iwanai resort, the westernmost part of the Niseko mountain range in Hokkaido, Japan, Multicoin co-founder Kyle Samani stands beneath a snow-covered ridge, wearing a helmet and carrying a snowboard.

This is the latest tweet after Kyle Samani announced his departure from Multicoin.

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

Although quickly deleted, many people still saw it.

Later, Kyle provided a more moderate explanation in an open letter: "This is a bittersweet moment. Multicoin is one of the most important and rewarding experiences in my life. But I also look forward to taking a temporary 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 spend some time systematically exploring these areas."

Kyle Samani's about-face seems to have made the industry clearly realize for the first time: those among the earliest advocates of Web3 are also beginning to waver.

The Golden Age of FTX and Multicoin

In the crypto VC community, Kyle Samani is one of the most prolific writers among investors, constantly producing long-form 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 crypto-native value.

Many people know that Multicoin is one of the most ardent supporters of the Solana ecosystem, but many don't know that Multicoin was not originally a "Solana-based" institution.

In 2017–2018, Multicoin's core bet was actually on EOS. At the time, EOS was packaged as the "performance killer" and the "Ethereum killer," emphasizing high TPS, low latency, and suitability for large-scale applications. Multicoin was also one of the most ardent supporters, heavily investing early on and deeply participating in the ecosystem's development.

But the results are known to all: governance failure, ecological hollowing out, developer loss, and capitalization. EOS has basically declared failure.

For Multicoin, this is a near "faith-level" setback. If they continue to bet wrong on the next generation of public chains, this institution will basically be marginalized by the market.

So after the EOS collapse, Multicoin started extremely carefully looking for "the next real chain that can run a financial system."

From 2019 to 2020, FTX developed very rapidly. But SBF faced a practical problem: Ethereum was too slow and too expensive. Matching, liquidation, derivatives, and on-chain settlement could all not run smoothly. He needed a blockchain with extremely high TPS, extremely low latency, suitable for high-frequency financial systems, and capable of handling exchange-level traffic.

At this time, Kyle had already been systematically studying Solana, and Solana's features just happened to align with 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 their conversation was only one question: Can Solana handle transactions at a real scale?

This phone call is viewed by many insiders as: Solana's turning point.

What happened later was actually very "Wall Street." SBF didn't fully trust Kyle. He chose to verify it himself, so they launched a large number of junk transactions on Solana as an aggressive stress test, to see if Solana would crash.

The result is: Solana held up.

What happened next is basically known to us, FTX fully entered the scene. The FTX/Alameda group heavily bought SOL, invested in Solana ecosystem projects, provided liquidity, market making, and listed related assets. Multicoin continued to increase positions, provided external endorsements, conducted research promotion, institutional roadshows, etc.

Early core projects in the Solana ecosystem are almost all closely related to the FTX/Alameda group and the Multicoin group, who have formed a de facto alliance. They work together to create hype, provide funding, boost prices, and build the ecosystem.

With their help, Solana rose to become a top public chain, FTX gradually became the largest exchange, and Multicoin also became a top-tier VC. At their peak, they achieved mutual success, and many still miss that golden era.

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

Even after leaving his job, Kyle Samani is still bullish on SOL, emphasizing that he remains optimistic about cryptocurrencies, especially Solana, and plans to stay personally involved. After all, as a co-founder of Multicoin, he managed about $5.9 billion in assets, but his most successful label has always been: one of the earliest believers in Solana.

Now, he continues to serve as 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, essentially increasing my SOL exposure. I'm still super bullish on SOL, super bullish on crypto."

Even if he turned around and left, he still stood on Solana.

Multicoin is also more like a "narrative factory"

When it was founded in 2017, Multicoin set a very rare positioning for itself — a thesis-driven VC, a thesis-driven investment institution.

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

Identify structural opportunities in advance, package the opportunities into trends through academic papers, and then use capital to turn the trends into reality. Web3, DePIN, PayFi, data sovereignty, AI+Crypto, privacy... many of the mainstream narratives we have seen in recent years almost all have Multicoin's shadow behind them.

If there is one narrative that Multicoin has been most successful in over the years, which one would it be? This BlockBeats editor believes the answer is DePIN.

Since 2019, Multicoin has been repeatedly discussing a question: Why can blockchains only serve finance? Could they directly transform real-world infrastructure? Thus, they proposed the initial concept of DePIN: using token incentives to drive the construction of physical networks.

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

The reason DePIN is taking off is largely not because of technological breakthroughs, but because: Multicoin has explained it well.

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

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

Helium, Hivemapper, GEODNET... one phenomenon project after another has emerged in the Solana ecosystem. Helium once deployed over 600,000 hotspots within 30 months, directly challenging traditional telecom networks. Hivemapper is redefining the mapping system with crowd-sourced devices. These projects have become model examples for DePIN.

By 2025–2026, DePIN had become a standard institutional track. Grayscale included it in its research report, estimating the market size to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The earliest systematic bettors were Multicoin.

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

Have we failed?

As Kyle turned to leave, another tweet was also being repeatedly forwarded within the community.

From Vitalik.

When discussing the Ethereum L2 ecosystem, he unusually adopted an almost self-reflective tone: "The progress of L2 entering Stage 2 has been much slower and more difficult than we expected. At the same time, L1 itself is actually continuing to scale up."

Another translation of this passage could also be: Sorry, we failed. Not a technical failure. But a narrative failure.

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

What can blockchain actually do? Ten years have passed, and although we haven't found the correct answer yet, fortunately, we have at least ruled out one wrong answer.

Kyle's departure marks the end of an era, but we may also be about to welcome a new one.

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

Over the past decade, Bitcoin has experienced countless moments where it "seemed over": Mt.Gox, the 2014 ban, the ICO crash, March 12th, FTX... Each time, the market declared its death; each time, it slowly crawled back.

The narrative will fail, the cycle will end, and capital will retreat.

But as long as there are still people willing to bet their time on technology and their reputation on the system, this industry will never truly go back to zero.

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