What value is there in crypto? (2025)
Introduction
Obvs, this is not financial advice. Just my perspective.
The global crypto market cap is $3.68T. Insane. Basically, I’m more of a Buffett kind of an investor. I try to invest only in things that I understand. That means that I understand how the particular business at hand generates value. Value being anything from increased productivity to just something people consistently are willing to pay for to satisfy their needs or wants. Currency is more of a tool. The price of a currency just seems to be a specific state that it’s at. This does not necessarily mean that it will produce any additional value on top of that existing price. So in a way, if I buy 100 dollars worth of British pounds, that does not mean I just invested into the currency. That just means I changed the store of value to another vehicle. This store of value does affect the underlying value just a bit, and people have made a lot of money with forex trading, but this is not because of the currency driving value, but rather in most cases simply arbitrage opportunities.
We’ll look at a handful of the most popular coins, review them, and then share some takeaways. I’ll add a shovel meter (with some help ;)) to each of these.
So why do I care
A lot of my friends tend to be surprisingly deeply interested in cryptocurrencies and I’ve just shooed the topic away whenever it came to it. That’s because I had never been convinced of any cryptos driving any actual value. But I think a lot of time has passed, and it’s a great place to actually go through the most known cryptocurrencies and see what they’re about and whether I actually do find any value in them. As a disclaimer, this is extremely subjective, as the way I invest into things is a lot different from a lot of people, including what I find valuable.
Selection
I will focus on pretty much anything other than BTC and ETH as their sheer size is kind of making them somewhat safe and uninteresting. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just assume that if I am willing to burn a 1000 USD on any crypto, I will probably not see any interesting movement with these two for a while.
A good place as any to start with is the list at https://www.kraken.com/prices. I am acutely aware that some of the most interesting movements are probably happening at the microcoin level that Kraken doesn’t even carry, but the curiosity here is more about the coins that the general public have already deemed valuable and to see whether I think the same.
L1 stablecoins & payment rails
L1: the core blockchain protocol that records transactions directly on-chain and secures the network; everything else is built on top of this base layer.
Tether (USDT)
Tether’s point is to be just equivalent to the US dollar in price. So I guess it wholly serves as a currency. As mentioned, I don’t think any value from being “just a currency” is meaningful enough for me to care about.
Their own website is a good example of how a lot of these projects enlist functionalities, but not the problems solved. If you look at it from the lens of a business, that’s a red flag. It means the systems are built first and then looked for things to do with it, rather than first seeing problems that need solving, and then building systems to solve them. But I forgive Tether, because part of its point is to be boringly “tethered” to the dollar. But that also means that as an investment, it’s not great.
Shovel meter: Tether (USDT) – 98 % Pegged dollar, no utility beyond trading/off-ramping.
USDC (Circle)
Just like Tether.
Shovel meter: USDC – 96 % Slightly better compliance footprint, still just fiat proxy.
XRP
Built for fast payments, so in a sense just another currency. I like its branding and prefer it over the main stablecoins, but it really doesn’t seem to have anything going for it.
Ripple’s page says XRP is for utility. Says XRP facilitates transactions. Mhm, like the dollar, but fancier.
Shovel meter: XRP – 88 % Cross-border settlement pitch exists, but adoption remains limited and largely speculative.
Stellar (XLM)
Finance, shovels.
Shovel meter: Stellar (XLM) – 90 % Similar “payments” story, modest NGO usage doesn’t dent speculation dominance
Large ecosystems
BNB
This one says it allows for development of large-scale decentralized applications (dApps). This is kind of an interesting idea in itself. It grew out of Binance, so it used to be Binance Coin.
Looking at BNB’s dApps, I’m trying to find things that improve productivity and aren’t just about the currency itself. If it’s like gambling around the currency itself, then that defeats the purpose of it being useful.
decentralized applications (dApps—blockchain-based software where the business logic lives in smart contracts, so no single entity can shut it down)
- World of Dypians - from the videos I can see that this game is currency first, game second. There basically is no activity on it on YouTube.
- SERAPH - a bad Diablo 4 clone, seems to be just leeching off of its success without adding anything
- Alaya AI - convoluted mess of a decentralized data labelling system, but from the sound of it one of the most useful things so far
- OpenpadAI - just big words with nothing in it. On their webpage you get greeted with a gambling-esque popup.
- Mind Network - looks cool, but also focuses on technology, not problems. “Computation on encrypted data.” Mm, sounds potentially useful at one point in the future.
That was the top 5. I’ll peruse through some others to see if I can find anything useful. Port3 looks cool, but I don’t understand the problems it solves. While going through the list of different dApps, they almost all seem to be self-serving somehow, meaning that they don’t seem to be reaching into the real world, but rather build on top of each other, like a big sandcastle. Which is kind of the thing I want to avoid seeing. Like with the goldrush, I don’t want to see shovel merchants, I want to see how gold is being used in the industry.
By the way, a lot of the dApps I went through aren’t just on BNB, but on other cryptocurrencies as well.
Shovel meter: BNB – 80 % Thriving but casino-heavy dApp scene; a few real DeFi/infra plays pull it below the 90s.
Solana (SOL)
Solana is often my friends’ favorite one. So I’ll give this one the benefit of the doubt.
It seems that its focus is its ecosystem of apps and services that rely on Solana, even though essentially it still largely only functions as a currency. On its homepage, it again advertises itself by its functionalities, not the problem space that it provides solutions into. Well, other than just being a currency, of course. But I do like that it has a section for case studies ‒ “designed for real world use”.
The one use case that does seem somewhat interesting is a loyalty program. That’s because a lot of shops that do loyalty programs tend to use their own homegrown credit system. But why not tie that into the larger ecosystems of cryptocurrencies indeed. But then again, then you lose control over the supply and can be strongly affected by the market situation unless the program pegs points to fiat or hedges the exposure. As a coffee shop, you don’t want customers to be able to buy a years worth of coffee for free just because a currency has boomed. Or maybe you do, idk.
Even though the case studies is still mostly shovels, I think it’s laudable they’re one of the few ones that actually aim to do something for the real world.
A case study that I think is great is solving the Ticketmaster problem: https://solana.com/news/case-study-xp. Good job, XP! Tickets are inherently a digital product, and transferring ownership of digital goods is a decent use case for crypto. Of course, it doesn’t need to be XP that does that. Ticketmaster could make their own blockchain too.
Shovel meter: Solana (SOL) – 65 % High-throughput chain now hosts NFTs, payments, and consumer apps (e.g., Helium migration); real usage rising.
TRON (TRX)
Kind of confusing what it stands for. Seems to want to do everything for everyone. But I did see that it also does dApps, but all of them shovels.
Shovel meter: TRON (TRX) – 94 % Network activity is mostly USDT transfers and gambling; little non-financial utility.
Cardano (ADA)
I actually remember looking at it years ago, and thinking that it’s just full of marketing fluff with no body. That hasn’t changed today.
Shovel meter: Cardano (ADA) – 90 % Research-first ethos, but tangible dApp traction and enterprise pilots are still thin.
Polkadot (DOT)
Cool branding. But I have no idea where the value is.
Shovel meter: Polkadot (DOT) – 85 % Parachain tech is interesting; end-user demand outside crypto remains sparse.
Sui
Language is pretty corporate. Transforming, changing, providing… and nothing concrete.
Shovel meter: Sui – 92 % New Move-based L1; admirable tech, yet current usage is NFTs/games for insiders.
Memecoins
Dogecoin (DOGE)
It would scare you if you knew how much some of my friends are in this.
Other than just a memecoin, I wonder if its gotten any better at anything over the years. Its main advantage is its non-seriousness. The project’s website says it’s being used for tipping. Fair enough, I guess.
Shovel meter: Dogecoin (DOGE) – 99 % Payment memes aside, utility is tipping on social media—nearly all sentiment-driven.
Bridging & middleware
Chainlink
Seems like they’re connecting the actual big banks with onchain. Of all the websites, theirs seem to be the most serious and looks more like a real business. But that doesn’t still say that I see the real value. If I were to build something on top of NFTs or crypto, this one would seem to be the first choice.
Shovel meter: Chainlink (LINK) – 55 % Price oracles secure billions in DeFi TVL; enterprise “CCIP” pilots give it a meaningful non-shovel slice.
Real-world-focused networks - AI picks
So having gone through all the options, I am still a bit lost on where the real world problem solving is. Let’s see whether ChatGPT can aggregate some of that data better for me.
Wow, the responses here are actually really interesting.
AI pick 1: Helium (HNT)
Cheap, wide‑area connectivity for low‑power IoT sensors (smart parking, agriculture, asset tracking)
Cellular LPWAN (NB‑IoT, LTE‑M) requires licensed spectrum, carrier contracts and recurring fees (~US $6 / device / year for NB‑IoT, plus data caps)
Crowdsourced hotspots create the world’s largest LoRaWAN mesh; sensors pay US $0.00001 per 24‑byte message—often < US$1 per device per year, with no annual contract. Real deployments include Nobel Systems’ smart‑parking rollout using Helium for real‑time occupancy data
Economic incentive flips the cost structure. Helium’s micro‑payment model is impossible without an on‑chain asset that can be subdivided into dust‑level units and settled automatically. Try billing US $0.00001 per packet with Visa rails.
Extremely tiny payments is probably an area that crypto can truly win. This is in the case where the gas fees are almost nonexistent.
Shovel meter: Helium (HNT) – 40 % IoT rollout is slow but live; migration to Solana cut costs; physical-infrastructure element lowers shovel score.
AI pick 2: VeChain (VET)
End‑to‑end product traceability & anti‑counterfeiting (food, wine, auto parts)
Central databases are only as honest as the weakest participant; data can be tampered with and consumers can’t independently verify it.
VeChain’s immutable ledger plus NFC/RFID tagging gives every stakeholder the same tamper‑proof history. Walmart China logs > 200 million on‑chain events so shoppers can scan and see a product’s farm‑to‑shelf journey; DNV’s “My Story” for luxury wine and BMW’s “VerifyCar” for odometer fraud run on the same chain
Hehe, so cool! You can actually see the journey of your products, where it matters. This probably has more use in the future as people become more conscious about their consumption. Interesting point by ChatGPT here that essentially why this hasn’t been possible before is that the centralized databases aren’t incentivized to be tamper-proof.
Shovel meter: VeChain (VET) – 30 % Supply-chain tagging in Walmart China, DNV, BMW. Still small, yet genuinely off-chain.
AI pick 3: Render Network (RNDR)
Affordable, on‑demand GPU rendering for 3D/AI workloads
AWS/GCP GPU instances are pricey, billing opaque, and scarce during demand spikes.
Render taps idle GPUs worldwide; you pay only for minutes actually rendered, with costs “dramatically lower” than AWS according to studios and artists using the network today
Render only works because thousands of GPU owners trust they’ll be paid automatically and transparently—smart‑contract escrow removes counter‑party risk and lets the network aggregate hardware that would otherwise sit idle.
That is truly interesting. It’s like AirBNB, but for GPUs. Neat!
Shovel meter: Render (RNDR) – 35 % Decentralized GPU marketplace with paying studios; speculation exists but solves costly rendering.
AI pick 4: Filecoin (FIL)
Long‑term, censorship‑resistant storage of public data (cultural heritage, government websites)
Central cloud or tape archives put all eggs in one corporate basket—vulnerable to outages, policy shifts, or cost hikes.
Data is sharded and cryptographically proved across thousands of independent storage providers. The Internet Archive’s entire 2024‑25 U.S. End‑of‑Term Web Archive and 500k+ Smithsonian/Flickr artifacts are now stored on Filecoin so they survive data‑center failures or political meddling
I then asked on how that differs from just using torrents, and got a pretty satisfying answer ― it’s about incentives.
Filecoin flips the equation: storage providers post collateral and must keep producing Proof‑of‑Spacetime. Fail a proof and their stake is slashed, so walking away isn’t an option. BitTorrent is unbeatable for ephemeral, high‑demand distribution. It is terrible at custodial preservation because it can’t compel anyone to keep storing what nobody is downloading. Filecoin’s pay‑for‑proof model does exactly that, and that’s why the Internet Archive and museums—not crypto‑native projects—are paying for it.
Shovel meter: Filecoin (FIL) – 35 % Deals with Internet Archive, Web3.storage, CERN; economic model incentivizes long-term storage.
Takeaways
Well, I guess I wasn’t completely surprised that there are actually some real-world use cases for crypto. But among the top cryptocurrencies, there’s almost no value other than finance shovels. That does not mean that it would be bad to convert fiat into these. A lot of the most popular cryptocurrencies move together with Bitcoin et al in direction.
If I ever become an investor in this space, I would probably keep tabs on the most useful ones, and if these start gaining ground with market cap, it’s best to probably double down. I think my favorite non-shovels here are Render Network and VeChain. Of the shovels, Chainlink looks the best, and maybe Solana.
Do you know of good non-shovels? I am interested to hear of them.