Why crypto's best infrastructure companies stopped looking like crypto?

The article reads like AI, which is a shame because the topic is at least in-theory compelling.

'Crypto' adopts to some extent a principle of being 'decentralized' and now has to square what it means for that type of hardware to compete with economies of scale which are naturally centralized.

"Decentralized" is just a bad metric. The real value-add of 'crypto' done right is accountability; Bitcoin mining is just the simplest example: any miner who builds less utilitarian blocks (either worse transaction selection or building on a bad history) is accountable by any other miner with the same margins who will maximize that utility, thus their income.

The urge to 'decentralize' is always in tension with that efficiency optimization. It is fine for an agent with concentrated power (under certain bounds) to be in a system, so long as they are accountable, usually by being easily replaceable.

Unfortunately a lot of 'crypto' intuition is just based on the idea of a wide breadth of servers or nodes equals some meaningful distribution of power, which is naive.

"The Pattern", "The Evidence", "The Inflection Point".

Claude.

Every infrastructure sector in modern history developed using the same playbook. Someone builds raw capacity ahead of demand. The raw resource commoditizes and gets cheaper forever. And the money moves to whoever sells guaranteed, contracted service on top of it. So far, cloud ran it, telecom ran it, even chip makers did it to an extent. Crypto infrastructure is attempting to repeat it right now. Imho, by the end of 2027, the majority of DePIN demand-side revenue will settle off-chain under enterprise contracts, and the on-chain dashboards will be tracking a minority share