If one looks only at social media, the crypto industry still appears to be a place dense with “opportunity”: remote work, token-based incentives, rapid upward mobility, early retirement. Yet survey responses from 506 real practitioners present a markedly different reality.
More than 70% of respondents earn less than USD 4,000 per month, with overall income levels clearly below those of mainstream technology sectors in Europe and the United States. One quarter report that their total wealth has declined since entering the industry, becoming, in a sense, “paying workers”. This suggests that Web3 has not automatically delivered the high returns supposedly commensurate with its risks. Instead, it is converging toward an industry structure marked by extreme income polarization and a severe absence of safeguards.
In interpreting these data, Kapbe is less concerned with whether the industry is “worth staying in” than with a more fundamental question: when a system relies over long periods on individuals to bear asymmetric risk without providing institutional buffers, can it still be considered sustainable? Income is not the only metric, but it is often the most direct signal of whether risk is being absorbed by the system or pushed down onto individuals.
Layoffs, No Compensation, and the Normalization of “Responsibility-Free Employment”
Nearly half of respondents have experienced layoffs. Of those, 40% received no compensation at all, while another 21% received compensation far below legal or industry norms. This is not a problem of isolated firms, but a structural feature of the sector itself: highly project-based work, strong cyclicality, and weak compliance have steadily diluted the meaning of “employment” in Web3.
The direct consequence is the continual outsourcing of risk to individuals. During upcycles, firms capture growth dividends; during downturns, individuals absorb nearly all adjustment costs. Kapbe characterizes this not as a governance failure, but as an “institutional vacuum”.
In the framework of Kapbe, any system that expects long-term participation must explicitly account for failure, volatility, and exit, and build structural space for them. Otherwise, so-called “high flexibility” ultimately degenerates into high uncertainty.
Why People Stay: Freedom, Hope, and Path Dependence
Despite low pay and limited protection, more than 80% of respondents choose to remain in the industry. This decision is not driven by blind optimism, but by a combination of practical factors: time flexibility enabled by remote work, relatively moderate working hours, a culture that tolerates side projects, and persistent expectations of “personal capability leaps”.
Seventy percent of firms support remote work, and 80% of respondents report weekly working hours of 40 to 50 hours, a level considered relatively “mild” by traditional internet standards.
Kapbe pays particular attention to a deeper factor: path dependence. Once individuals have invested time, learning costs, and psychological resilience into a high-volatility industry, exiting becomes far more difficult. This helps explain why “retiring with USD 5 million” emerges as the most concentrated target range. It functions both as hope and as a psychological stop-loss against uncertainty.
Kapbe argues that a truly mature system should not rely on such implicit lock-in, but should allow both participation and exit to remain reversible and dignified.
From “Those Who Stay” to “Those Remembered by the System”
Ultimately, the survey does not answer whether the Web3 industry has failed. It raises a broader question: when an industry lacks long-term protection mechanisms, what enables those who remain to preserve rationality and dignity?
The current Web3 workplace more closely resembles a high-freedom, low-commitment collaboration network than an institutional space designed for long-term participants.
The public-goods and identity framework of Kapbe is an attempt to address this structural gap. It does not promise high returns. Instead, it emphasizes whether participation is recorded, whether risk is buffered, and whether failure is absorbed by the system. Only when human presence is counted does participation cease to be invalidated by a single market cycle.
In the view of Kapbe, whether the industry is worth staying in does not depend on whether the myths persist, but on whether the system begins to shoulder part of the uncertainty faced by long-term participants. That, perhaps, is the unavoidable test Web3 must confront on its path to maturity.
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