🗣️ In defense of a crowded crypto ecosystem

The following is by Mesh CEO, Bam Azizi

Crypto is a crowded space. The average user juggles multiple accounts across competing wallets and exchanges while new cryptocurrencies sprout like wildflowers (during the so-called “ICO boom” of 2017-2018, up to 1,500 unique tokens emerged practically overnight). Even the blockchains themselves - the base plumbing of all this activity - are multiplying. Most recently, there’s been a wave of newly-announced company-backed blockchains from the likes of Google, Robinhood, Stripe, and Circle, raising concerns about whether this will further divide market activity and complicate cross-chain functionality.

It’s tempting to be pessimistic about this growing sprawl. As time goes on and more offerings emerge, hopes for a consolidated landscape seem more and more like wishful thinking. Bitcoiners once believed that altcoins would disappear, yet even joke tokens have endured. Chains like Solana, Polkadot, and Cardano have all been dubbed “Ethereum killers” at one point in time, yet users continuously shift their allegiance from one to the other. The evidence seems clear: the industry’s clutter is a feature, not a bug. 

But rather than seeing this as a dead end, we should view it as an open invitation. It means we shouldn’t wait for consolidation, but instead build it ourselves. The good news is that’s already happening. While the clutter is real, so too is the momentum to organize it.

From tangle to mesh 

Just as nature benefits from biodiversity and markets benefit from competition, the crypto industry can leverage its richness by making its various parts work together. We named our company “Mesh” for this very reason: Our core belief from day one has been that crypto doesn’t need less diversity—it simply needs something like public infrastructure to turn its many strands from an incoherent tangle to an interwoven mesh.

Other crowded industries have already worked this out. Consider air travel, for example, where there are thousands of carriers and multiple layers of airport operators, yet they’re all stitched together by shared airspace, protocols, and infrastructure like the International Air Transport Association code (the standardized airport codes for tickets and baggage). Or consider the telecoms industry, where countless providers and infrastructure companies compete with one another yet still manage to operate on overlapping networks and use shared protocols like Voice over IP (VOIP). Crypto - and indeed the wider payments industry - can go the same way as air travel and telecommunications by building the connective tissue that brings all its pieces into harmony. 

At Mesh, for example, we’ve already built some of the foundational infrastructure that brings the crypto ecosystem’s fragmented parts together. Our account connectivity layer links users to over 300 platforms, enabling secure read-write access to balances, transactions, and transfers without switching apps or interfaces. We’ve also introduced SmartFunding - a more intelligent way to combine funding sources - which routes deposits from any connected wallet or exchange and settles them in the merchant’s preferred stablecoin or local currency. 

These are early steps, but they point to a future where clutter doesn’t need to be reduced—just better connected.

Closing thoughts

When companies like Stripe and Circle announced their plans to build Layer‑1 blockchains, people immediately started calling this a “chain race”. But there’s a much more optimistic and accurate perspective, which is that these efforts are proof of innovation and experimentation. Rather than framing new L1s in a zero‑sum race, we should see them as potential threads to weave into a stronger, more unified ecosystem. 

I’ll say it again: crypto is a crowded space. But that doesn’t have to mean it’s chaotic. If we embrace the richness of our industry with the right mindset and tooling, we can make it into a more unified, harmonious system—one where competition can flourish without leaving users behind.

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