Is it the end of an era for new general purpose blockchains?

Welcome back to Talking Tokens.

Shameless plug: If you’re looking for more content this week, I was a guest on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast yesterday.

OG listeners know this, but it was quite the full circle moment for me going back on TechCrunch. I was a senior crypto reporter there and left to start my own company (Token Relations) and this podcast (Talking Tokens). Fast forward two years, and I’m back on TechCrunch as a guest — instead of a reporter 🙂

You can check out the episode here and the article here.

Anyways, that’s enough about me. Today’s episode is a great conversation with two stellar guests. Check it out below!

The era of general-purpose blockchains may be coming to an end as developers, users and investors alike look for chains that serve specific use cases to invest their time and money. 

Both Mason Nystrom, partner at Pantera Capital, and Daniel Marin, CEO of Nexus, shared this sentiment on Token Relations’ Talking Tokens podcast. 

“I think if you’re building a general-purpose chain today, you’re dead on arrival,” Nystrom said. “You’re not going to be able to get users or developers. You have to have an opinion.” That opinion can be centered around a technical advantage or a specific category, but it should be clearly defined, he added.

While that might be the case for new chains today, it doesn’t necessarily apply to legacy ones that have been in the market for years. Still, many general-purpose blockchains that have been around long-term have been diving into upcoming sectors like tokenization, DeFi, AI or gaming.

The previous market cycle was driven by a lot of architectural experimentation, but blockchains are now building in a different era, Nystrom said. 

In short, the market has “tasted quality,” and isn’t going back, Marin pointed out. There was a time when general-purpose chains made sense, especially in early days. Ethereum for example, was one of the early pioneers and gained tons in market share, and is currently home to tons of developer activity and apps. 

But if Ethereum launched in today’s market, it might not have flourished as it has. 

In contrast, recent blockchains like Hyperliquid have “won” by having a focused application, user experience and design that was tailored to a specific audience. “In capitalism, you need to specialize to solve a problem better than everyone else,” Marin said. “If you don’t do something better than everyone else, you’re not going to attract capital.” 

Today, the industry is rediscovering the importance of going back to fundamentals. This means providing sustainable revenue, increasing value to token holders, and long-term economic viability. 

For Marin’s company, Nexus, that path involves “verifiable finance,” which is bringing traditional financial products fully onchain in ways that are programmable, composable and transparent.

“The blockchain universe is looking more and more like traditional finance,” Mairin said. “And traditional finance is looking more and more at deploying [on] blockchain protocols that interoperate with the rest of crypto.” 

And when these two universes are meshed together, it will open up the door to more exotic primitives and economic properties unseen in traditional finance, Marin noted. 

For example, BlackRock and Securitize are working with Uniswap to bring BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) onchain to UniswapX. Separately, Apollo just said it “may acquire” 90 million MORPHO tokens over a 48-month period, in addition to working together to support Morpho’s onchain lending markets. 

In essence, there are tons of ways the systems are going to connect, Nystrom said. It’s going to look similar to the internet today, where anyone can build on top of it.

“We think that there is this massive universe of design, of greater economic efficiency, faster payments, volume, settlements, and so on,” Marin said. “That is still to be built on the blockchain that can bring a lot of greater economic, efficiency and innovation.”

That said, Marin acknowledges that all of this is still a bet that the era of general-purpose blockchains is over, and specialized chains like Nexus can now prosper. ”Perhaps that bet will be a successful bet in the financial sense.”

All in, crypto is no longer about the best blockchain design. It’s now about  differentiated experiences that can change the game and usher in an application-specific, economically sustainable era. 

Check out the next section for more details and the full episode.

For today’s episode, I interviewed Mason Nystrom, partner at Pantera Capital who hosts the Stateful podcast, and Daniel Marin, CEO of Nexus, about the state of crypto venture capital, the consolidation phase happening across markets, and what it takes to launch a blockchain in 2026. Mason explains why 2025 saw record venture dollars deployed into fewer deals, signaling maturation and companies finding product-market fit, while Daniel shares insights from building Nexus from a team of 10 to launching a specialized L1 blockchain focused on verifiable finance.

We discuss how cycles of consolidation lead to expansion, why specialization beats general-purpose blockchains, the return to fundamentals with revenue-generating protocols, and how stablecoins and perpetual exchanges are driving the shift toward verifiable finance. The conversation covers Nexus' partnership with M0 for its native stablecoin, the future intersection of permissionless systems and walled gardens, what characterizes a winner in crypto, and final advice to think independently and build conviction during uncertain markets.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Intro
01:27 – Why 2025 was an era of consolidation with record VC dollars into fewer deals
03:20 – Cycles of consolidation and expansion across crypto and AI markets
04:05 – Pantera as investor in Nexus' Series A
04:39 – What's changed for Nexus since raising: from 10 people to launching mainnet
05:47 – Announcing Nexus Exchange and USDX stablecoin partnership with M0
06:59 – Return to fundamentals and revenue-generating protocols driving the market
09:16 – Why specialization beats general-purpose blockchains
13:53 – Verifiable finance and building purpose-built L1s for financial applications
21:39 – How permissionless systems and walled gardens will coexist
28:13 – What characterizes a winner in crypto: urgency and relentless building
32:15 – Final advice: think independently and build conviction during uncertainty

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