Finance · Crypto · The Long View
Ten thousand coins is not a market. It is a waiting room.
I am going to say something that will irritate roughly half the internet: most of the crypto coins that exist today will not exist in ten years. Not just most of the tiny ones. Most of them, full stop. I say this not as a hater but as someone who once owned a fistful of coins with names I am now far too embarrassed to type, watched them quietly evaporate, and learned the lesson the market charges everyone eventually. The Wild West is thrilling right up until the sheriff rides into town.
Ten thousand coins and counting
Depending on who is doing the counting, somewhere north of ten thousand crypto tokens exist, with a fresh crop minted more or less every week. Some are serious projects run by serious people. A great many are jokes, copies of copies, or outright traps dressed up to look like opportunity. This is simply what a frontier looks like: wide open, lightly policed, full of genuine pioneers and people selling maps to gold that was never in the ground. Frontiers are exciting. They are also, statistically, where most fortunes go to disappear without a sound. The uncomfortable historical pattern is that the overwhelming majority of tokens ever launched have drifted toward nothing, and there is very little reason to believe the next wave will politely break the trend.
Every frontier eventually gets a sheriff
Here is what is changing, and why I think the map is about to be redrawn. The regulators are arriving, and they are not leaving. Europe has brought in a sweeping crypto rulebook. The United States has spent recent years wrestling its own market structure into shape. Britain’s watchdog is steadily building its regime, and, as I wrote recently, Japan has moved major digital assets squarely into the world of regulated financial products. None of this is designed to kill crypto. It is designed to civilise it, and civilisation has a way of thinning a wild population. When rules turn up, the projects that were only ever surviving on hype and the absence of scrutiny tend not to survive the scrutiny.
What ISO 20022 actually is, and what it is not
This is where a piece of financial plumbing enters the story, and where I need you to keep your wits about you, because it is one of the most misunderstood ideas in the whole space. ISO 20022 is a global standard for how financial institutions send messages to each other about money. That is genuinely it. It is the shared grammar that banks, payment systems and the international network connecting them are all moving over to, so that a payment instruction sent in Tokyo means precisely the same thing when it lands in London. It is real, it is quietly important, and the world’s financial messaging is steadily migrating onto it. You can read what it actually is on the standard’s own site.
Now the part where wits are required. In crypto circles, you will hear a great deal about ISO 20022-compliant coins, usually served up as a tidy shortlist of tokens supposedly destined for adoption by the world’s banks and therefore to make their holders rich. Treat that phrase with the caution you would give a stranger offering you a watch from inside his coat. ISO 20022 is a messaging standard, not a stamp of approval on a coin. Some of the organisations behind well-known projects are members of the standards body, which is a real and respectable thing, but sitting on a committee is not the same as the world’s banks agreeing to run their money across your token. The label compliant is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting in rooms where someone is usually trying to sell you something.
To be fair to the idea, the projects most often pointed to in this conversation, names such as XRP, Stellar, Hedera and Quant among them, are among the more serious attempts to build technology that could sit alongside the regulated financial system rather than shouting at it from the car park. That is a genuine point in their favour, and the bull case is not silly. If the plumbing of global finance moves to shared standards and begins to tokenise, the projects built to speak that language politely may well fare better than the ones built to moon on a meme. But the benefit is not guaranteed, and a serious attempt is also not a guaranteed win. If you ever meet a confident claim that a particular coin is officially compliant and therefore certain to be adopted, that is exactly the moment to slow down and check it for yourself, because these claims are murky, they shift, and they are catnip for the overexcited.
Why the herd will thin
Put the pieces together, and the longer-term trajectory looks less like ten thousand equal lottery tickets and more like a slow, uneven cull. As regulation hardens, as real-world use rather than pure speculation becomes the thing that keeps a project breathing, the coins with genuine utility, real adoption and a clean relationship with the rules stand a fighting chance. The thousands of clones and jokes do not. This is not a prediction of which specific names win, because I am nobody’s crystal ball. It is a prediction about the shape of the thing: a crowded, lawless frontier slowly becoming a smaller, sturdier town.
So what about the meme coins?
Which brings us, unavoidably, to the meme coins. I will not pretend they are all worthless, because a handful have minted real, if reckless, fortunes, and the culture around them is genuinely funny in a way finance rarely is. But let us be honest with each other. The overwhelming majority of meme coins are lottery tickets with better branding. They run on attention, and attention is the most fickle currency there is. In a lightly policed free-for-all, a coin can survive on pure vibes. In a maturing, watched, standardised market, vibes make a much thinner foundation. I suspect the phenomenon itself survives; humans will always gamble and always laugh, but I suspect the era of a joke coin casually outrunning serious projects grows rarer as the grown-ups take their seats. Crypto as a whole remains high risk, a point the FCA states plainly, and meme coins sit at the very wildest end of it. Enjoy them if you must, with money you have genuinely written off in advance, and never once confuse a good laugh for a strategy.
How I read it
So how do I hold all of this in my own head? I do not build a strategy on someone else’s promise, and a shared list of compliant coins circulating online is someone else’s promise wearing a lab coat. I look for utility, adoption and survivability rather than slogans. I keep my speculative corner genuinely small, and I only ever put money there that I have made peace with losing entirely. And I try to remember that in every gold rush, the people who did best were rarely the ones panning frantically for the shiniest new thing. They were the ones who understood where the whole river was heading. If you want the calmer, longer view instead of the daily noise, the ten changes that actually move the needle are the thinking I trust far more than any hot coin list.
The road always comes
The Wild West always ends the same way, not with the frontier lasting forever, but with roads, rules, and a few sturdy buildings where the saloons used to stand. The noise is deafening right now, and the temptation to chase it is real. But the long game rewards the person who watches where the river is going, not the one dazzled by the loudest splash. Be the head, not the tail. And do keep half an eye open on that unglamorous plumbing. It is far less exciting than a meme, and far more likely to matter.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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