WE BURNED $1M building a traffic machine for crypto. Here's what we learned I'm the founder of @Push_X, @XAMM_AI and one more product i can't name here (a bit of research and you'll find it) I've spent 7+ years in traffic, crypto and web3 investing. watching how projects get built, raise money and capture attention About 6 months ago we started building @XAMM_AI. The idea was to run large networks of niche accounts in one vertical, web3 in our case. we built it for ourselves and didn't plan to go public. Then we looked at what competitors were selling and saw how bad their tools were ~$200k went into building @XAMM_AI. another ~$100k into setting up, running and warming the accounts. the rest went into building @Push_X and our other product, plus buying outside traffic What we got: two projects, one of them is @Push_X. admin panel screenshots below The traffic part worked. the part that didn't is more interesting: crypto users as an audience are basically dead Before L2 season and memecoins you could watch projects build real revenue. today building a profitable crypto product without turning it into a casino is close to impossible. you either have to be old like CRV with a base that believes in you, or be an institution working between crypto and web2. How we figured it out: every time we tried to sell something and moved the conversation away from a token toward actual value, traffic dropped and FUD started. People don't want the product. they want the airdrop and free money. That's how L2s that raised hundreds of millions end up doing $5 a day in revenue. Nobody has an answer to "why would i keep spending money here after the drop?" look where funding goes now: payments and tokenized stocks. there people have to use the product. If you're an exporter paying the other side of the world and don't want to lose a chunk on fees, you use crypto DeFi for retail is fiction. A web3 product built from zero, away from governments, is fiction We have traffic, community and a product, and almost zero revenue from crypto natives ( 70$ per month ) Our team has worked with most of the big protocols and funds. didn't help Is crypto dead? Did the thing crypto-punks were afraid of actually happen?