2025 Through the Lens of The Crypto Vortex
2025 through The Crypto Vortex lens: AI shifted from hype to infrastructure, delivering real productivity gains while still requiring human judgment. Crypto remained volatile, but projects with real utility quietly strengthened the foundations of a new financial system. Heading into 2026, substance, systems, and adaptability matter more than narratives.
2025 was a year where acceleration stopped being abstract and became unavoidable.
From where we sit at The Crypto Vortex, the most striking shift was how quickly AI moved from novelty to infrastructure. This wasn’t about clever demos or viral prompts. It was about real, repeatable leverage. In our own work, AI consistently delivered 3–5× efficiency in research, analysis, and coding. Getting 60–80% of the way to an MVP is now routine.
That last 20% still matters. A lot. Judgment, domain expertise, and accountability remain human responsibilities. The narrative that “AI replaces humans” misses the point. What’s actually happening is a redistribution of effort. Humans are being pulled up the stack.
We also saw a clear transition away from prompt engineering as a skill worth fetishizing. The real gains came from workflow and context engineering: selecting the right model for the task, providing stable and relevant context, adding deterministic guardrails, and integrating tools where precision is required. Systems beat cleverness every time. That lesson repeated itself all year.
Crypto, predictably, looked chaotic on the surface. Price action was volatile. Narratives came and went. But underneath, the signal stayed consistent. Projects with real substance and utility continued to push deeper into the fabric of a new financial system. Infrastructure quietly advanced while speculation screamed for attention. At The Crypto Vortex, we’ve become increasingly biased toward the quiet builders: settlement layers, data availability, identity, compute, and coordination. Less noise. More plumbing.
Markets more broadly behaved in ways that resisted clean explanations. Correlations broke. Assumptions failed. The economy feels distorted, and no amount of research produces a confident forecast. That uncertainty is itself the data. Conviction without humility feels irresponsible right now.
Social and political discourse continued to polarize. The extremes grew louder and more performative, while thoughtful, level-headed discussion became harder to surface. X, in particular, has become difficult to use without heavy filtering. With intentional blocking and keyword controls, it can still be shaped into a useful signal stream, but neutrality no longer comes for free.
Looking ahead, we remain growth-oriented, especially around AI. But the second-order effects are impossible to ignore. Job displacement, role redefinition, and social adjustment are not theoretical anymore. How individuals and organizations adapt over the next few years will matter more than any single technology choice.
As we move into 2026, the posture at The Crypto Vortex is cautious, curious, and systems-focused. We’re interested in substance over speculation, workflows over hype, and tools that actually compound human capability. Expect volatility. Design for change. Keep humans where judgment matters.
Happy New Year from The Crypto Vortex. We’ll be sharing more observations, tools, and hard-earned insights throughout 2026.