Alliance Co-Founder Imran Khan Says Crypto’s Growth Was Overestimated as AI Led the Platform Shift

Alliance co-founder Imran Khan said the market previously overestimated how quickly crypto would become the next mainstream computing paradigm, arguing that artificial intelligence has largely taken on the role many expected crypto to play. According to ChainCatcher, Khan wrote on X that large amounts of capital flowed into crypto over the past decade, but a significant portion went into overbuilding rather than focusing on a small number of applications with clear advantages. He said the industry attempted to simultaneously reshape areas such as finance, social networks, and governance, and that the current market adjustment and consolidation is a natural correction after earlier overexpansion, not a sign that crypto’s core thesis has failed. Khan added that crypto’s most successful path may be to become global financial infrastructure before producing a “killer app.” He pointed to stablecoins, crypto wallets, tokenized stocks, and on-chain financial services reaching more users through digital banks and eventually serving AI agents. He said that if such infrastructure becomes widely adopted, crypto networks could become the internet’s default value settlement layer, potentially enabling broader adoption of models such as DAOs, decentralized markets, and machine-to-machine payments.