52% of cryptos launched since 2021 are dead. What should investors focus on in 2025?
ADVERTISEMENT Despite over 5,300 tokens launching daily, many of these projects lack utility or sustainability, with meme coins and scam tokens accounting for more than $500 million in investor losses in 2024, the report said.
The early crypto bull runs of 2016–2017 and 2020–2022 were largely driven by retail investors chasing quick gains in altcoins. But the market dynamic has shifted. Since 2024, governments and institutional players have increasingly entered the crypto space.
From the U.S., China, and Bhutan holding Bitcoin in sovereign reserves to BlackRock's $80 billion deployment through Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, institutional adoption is gaining momentum. Meanwhile, India has ranked No. 1 in global crypto adoption twice in the last three years, even as high taxation continues to challenge retail participation.The 1 Finance report suggests the crypto ecosystem is evolving into a more mature financial market. With increased adoption comes greater demand for credibility, accountability, and research-backed decisions.'While crypto markets may seem overwhelming with the daily influx of new coins, it is gradually maturing,' said Purvang Mashru, Senior Quantitative Research Analyst at 1 Finance. 'The crypto market cap has surpassed $3 trillion, and Bitcoin is now valued more than companies like Google and Meta. But volatility remains a key risk. A clear focus on education and fundamental analysis will help investors make better decisions.'
ADVERTISEMENT Mashru added that investors should apply the same rigour to crypto as they would to traditional assets—evaluating value, utility, and fit within a broader wealth strategy.
ADVERTISEMENT With token launches continuing at breakneck speed, separating high-potential projects from short-lived hype is increasingly important. The report stresses that serious investors are now turning to on-chain metrics—such as wallet activity, protocol revenue, developer contributions, and governance transparency—to assess a project's underlying strength.'Just like stock investors examine cash flows and profitability, crypto investors must understand what they're investing in and why it holds value,' the report said.
ADVERTISEMENT While hype-driven tokens will continue to capture headlines, the long-term winners are more likely to be those backed by strong fundamentals, real-world use cases, and institutional validation, 1 Finance noted.'A bigger trend is emerging. As governments and institutions increase their exposure, crypto is steadily becoming mainstream,' the report concluded. 'This highlights the importance of moving beyond short-term market noise and focusing on credible, research-backed projects. A thorough and informed approach will be key to capturing meaningful opportunities in the evolving digital asset space.'
(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of the Economic Times)
ADVERTISEMENT
(You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
3 minutes ago
- Mint
The new chips designed to solve AI's energy problem
'I can't wrap my head around it," says Andrew Wee, who has been a Silicon Valley data-center and hardware guy for 30 years. The 'it" that has him so befuddled—irate, even—is the projected power demands of future AI supercomputers, the ones that are supposed to power humanity's great leap forward. Wee held senior roles at Apple and Meta, and is now head of hardware for cloud provider Cloudflare. He believes the current growth in energy required for AI—which the World Economic Forum estimates will be 50% a year through 2030—is unsustainable. 'We need to find technical solutions, policy solutions and other solutions that solve this collectively," he says. To that end, Wee's team at Cloudflare is testing a radical new kind of microchip, from a startup founded in 2023, called Positron, which has just announced a fresh round of $51.6 million in investment. These chips have the potential to be much more energy efficient than ones from industry leader Nvidia at the all-important task of inference, which is the process by which AI responses are generated from user prompts. While Nvidia chips will continue to be used to train AI for the foreseeable future, more efficient inference could collectively save companies tens of billions of dollars, and a commensurate amount of energy. There are at least a dozen chip startups all battling to sell cloud-computing providers the custom-built inference chips of the future. Then there are the well-funded, multiyear efforts by Google, Amazon and Microsoft to build inference-focused chips to power their own internal AI tools, and to sell to others through their cloud services. The intensity of these efforts, and the scale of the cumulative investment in them, show just how desperate every tech giant—along with many startups—is to provide AI to consumers and businesses without paying the 'Nvidia tax." That's Nvidia's approximately 60% gross margin, the price of buying the company's hardware. Nvidia is very aware of the growing importance of inference and concerns about AI's appetite for energy, says Dion Harris, a senior director at Nvidia who sells the company's biggest customers on the promise of its latest AI hardware. Nvidia's latest Blackwell systems are between 25 and 30 times as efficient at inference, per watt of energy pumped into them, as the previous generation, he adds. To accomplish their goals, makers of novel AI chips are using a strategy that has worked time and again: They are redesigning their chips, from the ground up, expressly for the new class of tasks that is suddenly so important in computing. In the past, that was graphics, and that's how Nvidia built its fortune. Only later did it become apparent graphics chips could be repurposed for AI, but arguably it's never been a perfect fit. Jonathan Ross is chief executive of chip startup Groq, and previously headed Google's AI chip development program. He says he founded Groq (no relation to Elon Musk's xAI chatbot) because he believed there was a fundamentally different way of designing chips—solely to run today's AI models. Groq claims its chips can deliver AI much faster than Nvidia's best chips, and for between one-third and one-sixth as much power as Nvidia's. This is due to their unique design, which has memory embedded in them, rather than being separate. While the specifics of how Groq's chips perform depends on any number of factors, the company's claim that it can deliver inference at a lower cost than is possible with Nvidia's systems is credible, says Jordan Nanos, an analyst at SemiAnalysis who spent a decade working for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Positron is taking a different approach to delivering inference more quickly. The company, which has already delivered chips to customers including Cloudflare, has created a simplified chip with a narrower range of abilities, in order to perform those tasks more quickly. The company's latest funding round came from Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management and DFJ Growth, and brings the total amount of investment in the company to $75 million. Positron's next-generation system will compete with Nvidia's next-generation system, known as Vera Rubin. Based on Nvidia's road map, Positron's chips will have two to three times better performance per dollar, and three to six times better performance per unit of electricity pumped into them, says Positron CEO Mitesh Agrawal. Competitors' claims about beating Nvidia at inference often don't reflect all of the things customers take into account when choosing hardware, says Harris. Flexibility matters, and what companies do with their AI chips can change as new models and use cases become popular. Nvidia's customers 'are not necessarily persuaded by the more niche applications of inference," he adds. Cloudflare's initial tests of Positron's chips were encouraging enough to convince Wee to put them into the company's data centers for more long-term tests, which are continuing. It's something that only one other chip startup's hardware has warranted, he says. 'If they do deliver the advertised metrics, we will open the spigot and allow them to deploy in much larger numbers globally," he adds. By commoditizing AI hardware, and allowing Nvidia's customers to switch to more-efficient systems, the forces of competition might bend the curve of future AI power demand, says Wee. 'There is so much FOMO right now, but eventually, I think reason will catch up with reality," he says. One truism of the history of computing is that whenever hardware engineers figure out how to do something faster or more efficiently, coders—and consumers—figure out how to use all of the new performance gains, and then some. Mark Lohmeyer is vice president of AI and computing infrastructure for Google Cloud, where he provides both Google's own custom AI chips, and Nvidia's, to Google and its cloud customers. He says that consumer and business adoption of new, more demanding AI models means that no matter how much more efficiently his team can deliver AI, there is no end in sight to growth in demand for it. Like nearly all other big AI providers, Google is making efforts to find radical new ways to produce energy to feed that AI—including both nuclear power and fusion. The bottom line: While new chips might help individual companies deliver AI more efficiently, the industry as a whole remains on track to consume ever more energy. As a recent report from Anthropic notes, that means energy production, not data centers and chips, could be the real bottleneck for future development of AI. Write to Christopher Mims at
NDTV
2 hours ago
- NDTV
"Most Empathetic Voice": Neurodivergent People Find New Support In AI Tools For Social Navigation
For Cape Town-based filmmaker Kate D'hotman, connecting with movie audiences comes naturally. Far more daunting is speaking with others. "I've never understood how people [decipher] social cues," the 40-year-old director of horror films says. D'hotman has autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which can make relating to others exhausting and a challenge. However, since 2022, D'hotman has been a regular user of ChatGPT, the popular AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI, relying on it to overcome communication barriers at work and in her personal life. "I know it's a machine," she says. "But sometimes, honestly, it's the most empathetic voice in my life." Neurodivergent people - including those with autism, ADHD, dyslexia and other conditions - can experience the world differently from the neurotypical norm. Talking to a colleague, or even texting a friend, can entail misread signals, a misunderstood tone and unintended impressions. AI-powered chatbots have emerged as an unlikely ally, helping people navigate social encounters with real-time guidance. Although this new technology is not without risks - in particular some worry about over-reliance - many neurodivergent users now see it as a lifeline. How does it work in practice? For D'hotman, ChatGPT acts as an editor, translator and confidant. Before using the technology, she says communicating in neurotypical spaces was difficult. She recalls how she once sent her boss a bulleted list of ways to improve the company, at their request. But what she took to be a straightforward response was received as overly blunt, and even rude. Now, she regularly runs things by ChatGPT, asking the chatbot to consider the tone and context of her conversations. Sometimes she'll instruct it to take on the role of a psychologist or therapist, asking for help to navigate scenarios as sensitive as a misunderstanding with her best friend. She once uploaded months of messages between them, prompting the chatbot to help her see what she might have otherwise missed. Unlike humans, D'hotman says, the chatbot is positive and non-judgmental. That's a feeling other neurodivergent people can relate to. Sarah Rickwood, a senior project manager in the sales training industry, based in Kent, England, has ADHD and autism. Rickwood says she has ideas that run away with her and often loses people in conversations. "I don't do myself justice," she says, noting that ChatGPT has "allowed me to do a lot more with my brain." With its help, she can put together emails and business cases more clearly. The use of AI-powered tools is surging. A January study conducted by Google and the polling firm Ipsos found that AI usage globally has jumped 48%, with excitement about the technology's practical benefits now exceeding concerns over its potentially adverse effects. In February, OpenAI told Reuters that its weekly active users surpassed 400 million, of which at least 2 million are paying business users. But for neurodivergent users, these aren't just tools of convenience and some AI-powered chatbots are now being created with the neurodivergent community in mind. Michael Daniel, an engineer and entrepreneur based in Newcastle, Australia, told Reuters that it wasn't until his daughter was diagnosed with autism - and he received the same diagnosis himself - that he realised how much he had been masking his own neurodivergent traits. His desire to communicate more clearly with his neurotypical wife and loved ones inspired him to build Neurotranslator, an AI-powered personal assistant, which he credits with helping him fully understand and process interactions, as well as avoid misunderstandings. "Wow ... that's a unique shirt," he recalls saying about his wife's outfit one day, without realising how his comment might be perceived. She asked him to run the comment through NeuroTranslator, which helped him recognise that, without a positive affirmation, remarks about a person's appearance could come across as criticism. "The emotional baggage that comes along with those situations would just disappear within minutes," he says of using the app. Since its launch in September, Daniel says NeuroTranslator has attracted more than 200 paid subscribers. An earlier web version of the app, called Autistic Translator, amassed 500 monthly paid subscribers. As transformative as this technology has become, some warn against becoming too dependent. The ability to get results on demand can be "very seductive," says Larissa Suzuki, a London-based computer scientist and visiting NASA researcher who is herself neurodivergent. Overreliance could be harmful if it inhibits neurodivergent users' ability to function without it, or if the technology itself becomes unreliable - as is already the case with many AI search-engine results, according to a recent study from the Columbia Journalism Review. "If AI starts screwing up things and getting things wrong," Suzuki says, "people might give up on technology, and on themselves." Baring your soul to an AI chatbot does carry risk, agrees Gianluca Mauro, an AI adviser and co-author of Zero to AI. "The objective [of AI models like ChatGPT] is to satisfy the user," he says, raising questions about its willingness to offer critical advice. Unlike therapists, these tools aren't bound by ethical codes or professional guidelines. If AI has the potential to become addictive, Mauro adds, regulation should follow. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft (which is a key investor in OpenAI) suggests that long-term overdependence on generative AI tools can undermine users' critical-thinking skills and leave them ill-equipped to manage without it. "While AI can improve efficiency," the researchers wrote, "it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI." While Dr. Melanie Katzman, a clinical psychologist and expert in human behaviour, recognises the benefits of AI for neurodivergent people, she does see downsides, such as giving patients an excuse not to engage with others. A therapist will push their patient to try different things outside of their comfort zone. "I think it's harder for your AI companion to push you," she says. But for users who have come to rely on this technology, such fears are academic. "A lot of us just end up kind of retreating from society," warns D'hotman, who says that she barely left the house in the year following her autism diagnosis, feeling overwhelmed. Were she to give up using ChatGPT, she fears she would return to that traumatic period of isolation. "As somebody who's struggled with a disability my whole life," she says, "I need this." (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
NDTV
2 hours ago
- NDTV
Microsoft Snags Top AI Talent From Google, His First Week Already "Energizing"
In a big move in the ongoing AI talent race, Microsoft has hired Amar Subramanya, a senior AI expert who worked at Google for 16 years. The company has also brought in more than 20 AI specialists from Google's DeepMind team. This highlights Microsoft's strong focus on building a powerful AI team and staying ahead in the fast-growing world of artificial intelligence. Subramanya, who was previously the technical head of Google's Gemini chatbot project at DeepMind, has taken on the role of Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft. He shared the news through a LinkedIn post, expressing his excitement about the new role. Subramanya praised Microsoft's culture, describing it as "low ego and ambitious." He said the environment is collaborative, fast-paced, and focused on building advanced foundation models that support innovative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot. In his first week, Subramanya had conversations with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. He noted how open and accessible the company's leadership is, adding to his positive experience. "Just one week into my new role, I'm already feeling deeply energised. The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition. It reminds me of the best parts of a startup: fast-moving, collaborative, and deeply focused on building truly innovative, state-of-the-art foundation models to drive delightful AI-powered products such as Microsoft Copilot. In conversations with Mustafa Suleyman and Satya Nadella, their shared commitment to reimagining how people interact with these technologies every day is nothing short of inspiring," he wrote in the post. His post received many congratulatory messages on LinkedIn, with users celebrating his move and Microsoft's gain.
