Multicoin’s Kyle Samani Drops a Bombshell: ‘Web3 Is Dead. All We Have Is DeFi and DePIN’

In their place, Samani argued, only two sectors have proven their market fit and retain a clear economic purpose: decentralized finance (DeFi) and Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN). This statement was unambiguous: “Web3 is dead. All we have is DeFi and DePIN” .

Blockchains as Asset Ledgers, Not World Computers

This sector-level argument is built on a foundational belief about what blockchains are at their core. Samani characterized blockchains as “essentially asset ledgers” that will undoubtedly reshape global finance and capital markets, but he sees their utility ending there . This is a significant departure from the idea of blockchains as general-purpose “world computers” capable of running any application. Instead, his view reframes them as highly specialized financial infrastructure.

The implication is stark: if a blockchain is just a ledger, it is best used for managing ownership, facilitating transfers, and enabling complex financial operations—exactly the turf of DeFi and DePIN. This ledger-centric view strips away much of the ideological and technological ambition that defined the 2017-2022 era of crypto.

Crypto’s Identity Crisis: OGs Leave as Institutions Arrive

Samani’s declaration did not happen in a vacuum. It was a direct response to a thread from Eli Ben-Sasson, the CEO of StarkWare and a co-founder of StarkNet and Zcash. Ben-Sasson had posted earlier that day, on June 1, diagnosing a profound identity crisis gripping the crypto industry .

The crisis, as Ben-Sasson described it, is a painful paradox. On one side, many long-time developers and early adopter “OGs” who built the culture of crypto are now choosing to leave the space. On the other side, precisely those institutions and traditional finance (TradFi) entities that the original crypto movement set out to oppose are finally showing serious interest and entering the market .

The industry, Ben-Sasson suggested, is now struggling to answer a fundamental question: If the early rebels are gone and the old guard is becoming the new customer, what does crypto actually stand for?

From Thesis to Balance Sheet: The Forward Industries Connection

Samani’s sharp-edged thesis is not purely academic. As the Chairman of the Board of Forward Industries (NASDAQ: FORD), he is actively executing this vision at the scale of a public company.

Forward Industries recapitalized in September 2025 through a $1.65 billion PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) led by Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and Multicoin Capital. The company's new strategy is to operate as a “Solana-focused digital asset treasury company,” which it describes as an effort to “buy, hold, stake, trade, invest in, and grow SOL and SOL-related digital assets, protocols and businesses” .

This strategy is a direct product of Samani’s narrower worldview:

• The asset-ledger thesis in practice: If Solana is fundamentally an asset ledger for finance, Forward Industries’ entire job is to accumulate and compound that asset. By late 2025, the company had amassed more than 6.9 million SOL tokens, building what Samani has called “the largest Solana treasury in the world” . Its stated goal is not to build dApps but to “compound long-term SOL-per-share” for shareholders, treating the token like a hard financial asset .
• An exclusive focus on DeFi and staking: The company generates yield by running institutional-grade validator infrastructure and staking its substantial Solana holdings—operating squarely within the DeFi ecosystem that Samani identifies as one of the only two valid sectors left. The company’s strategy relies on the blockchain's financial rails, not on an expectation of mass-market consumer dApps .
• Not a platform play, a capital deployment strategy: Samani has framed Forward Industries as a mechanism for disciplined, yield-generating capital deployment on Solana’s ledger. The vision is to tokenize equity and eventually run corporate operations on-chain, but all of it orbits the central thesis of a blockchain as financial infrastructure, not as a platform for decentralized social media or gaming .

Samani’s declaration that “Web3 is dead” is therefore not just a provocative soundbite. It is a clear articulation of an investment thesis that he is now putting to work with billions of dollars in backing. It makes a bet that the future of crypto does not belong to a broad, ideological vision of a new internet, but to a focused, pragmatic one centered entirely on financial utility.