The Next Bull Market is Here, and Obvious | Spencer and Aleks, Blockchain Capital

When you look at stablecoins today, a remarkable dynamic emerges: a single billion dollars of net new issuance generates about $122 billion of economic activity and $19 million in downstream protocol revenue each year. That is happening right now, with $300 billion in stablecoins circulating on-chain. Spencer and Alex, two GPs at Blockchain Capital, argue that this flywheel is the overlooked engine of the next bull market — and that the crypto industry is about to inflect upward in a way most participants are missing entirely.

The buy-and-burn paradox and the lemon market

The conversation opens with a puzzle: why do the most successful crypto projects still use buy-and-burn models, even though they are capital-inefficient? The answer reveals a deeper structural problem. Crypto tokens have suffered from a "lemon market" dynamic — so many low-quality assets exist that serious projects must burn tokens just to signal they are different. "If markets hate uncertainty," Spencer notes, buybacks provide "some degree of certainty." Alex adds that "quality tokens need to show they're serious," and the buy-and-burn is the most credible way to do that today. Both GPs expect this to be temporary. In five years, as regulatory clarity arrives and trust improves, teams should be able to reinvest cash flows into growth instead of burning them — just as venture investors would never ask a