From Retail Hype to Enterprise Infrastructure: Lessons from Building Crypto Through the Cycles

Crypto rewards momentum and punishes fragility.

Many founders who entered the market during the 2020–2021 cycle learned this the hard way. Liquidity disappeared, counterparties failed, regulators reacted, and entire business models collapsed almost overnight. Only infrastructure survived.

Maxim Galash, founder of Coinchange and co-founder of BGS Venture, offers a useful case study in how crypto businesses evolve when markets turn hostile and why the future of crypto increasingly looks like enterprise SaaS rather than consumer fintech.

Retail Crypto Is Cyclical. Infrastructure Is Structural.

Coinchange launched as a retail DeFi “earn” platform, a familiar model at the time. Users deposited crypto and the platform generated yield via DeFi strategies rather than trading volatility. At peak the company had over 1,500 users and ~$100M in assets.

Then 2022 happened.

Centralized lenders failed, trust evaporated and regulators focused aggressively on retail-facing crypto products. The issue wasn’t just market prices, but also in counterparty risk, opacity and misaligned incentives.

Retail crypto demand is cyclical, enterprise crypto demand is structural.

When Coinchange pivoted away from retail and toward B2B infrastructure, the product didn’t fundamentally change, the buyer did.

Yield Is Not Speculation, If You Build It Correctly

A key misconception among non-crypto investors is that yield in crypto is synonymous with trading or leverage, but that’s inaccurate.

DeFi enables yield through:

• Liquidity provision

• Lending and borrowing

• Application-level staking (“yield farming”)

• Protocol participation incentives
  

These are closer to market infrastructure revenues than speculative, if risk is managed and exposure is transparent.

Coinchange’s insight was to treat DeFi participation like quantitative infrastructure allocation, not consumer gambling:

• Everything happens on-chain

• Assets are visible and auditable

• Yield comes from protocol economics, not price direction
  

For VCs, this matters. Yield-based crypto models fail when they rely on opacity or balance-sheet risk. They survive when they behave like middleware, not banks.

Emerging Markets Drive Real Crypto Adoption

Most meaningful crypto usage today is not in Silicon Valley, it’s in emerging markets.

In places like Latin America, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and parts of Asia:

• Inflation is persistent

• Access to USD-denominated savings products is limited

• Stablecoins are used as stores of value, not trading chips
  

This creates natural demand for:

• Stablecoin yield

• Crypto-to-fiat off-ramps

• Crypto-native payments (e.g., gift cards)
  

Coinchange’s customers are not end users, but local exchanges, wallets, neo-banks and payment providers serving these markets. These platforms already custody users and understand local regulation. What they lack is deep DeFi infrastructure.This is where embedded crypto finance becomes powerful.

Embedded Crypto Is the Winning Distribution Model

Instead of competing for users, Coinchange embeds its products:

• Earn infrastructure (APIs, vaults, dashboards)

• Fiat on/off-ramps

• Crypto-to-gift-card payouts
  

Partners white-label these features inside their own apps.

This solves three problems at once:

1. Distribution: partners already have users

2. Regulation: partners handle local compliance

3. Monetization: revenue is shared, not extracted.
   

There is no upfront cost to partners and integration creates new revenue streams immediately. This is closer to Stripe than to Coinbase.

For entrepreneurs, the takeaway is simple: selling picks and shovels beats selling gold, especially in volatile markets.

Transparency Beats Trust

One of the deepest failures of the 2022 crypto collapse was hidden risk.

Coinchange deliberately avoided internal lending desks or opaque yield sources. Everything is on-chain, partners can see assets move, vault balances are verifiable, smart contracts enforce behavior.

In crypto, trust does not scale; verification does.

Infrastructure businesses that embrace radical transparency are far more defensible than consumer brands asking users to “believe” in them.

Non-Custodial Is the Next Wave

The next evolution Max highlights is non-custodial infrastructure:

• Earn products where users retain control via smart contracts

• Off-ramps and cards that don’t require custody

• Wallet-native integrations (Ledger, MetaMask)
  

This mirrors a broader shift in crypto:

• Custody introduces regulatory friction

• Non-custodial design shifts risk to code

• Privacy-first products unlock new markets

Smart contract audits, not marketing budgets, become the gating factor.

Why This Matters for Crypto and AI Investors

Crypto and AI intersect at the infrastructure layer.

Both reward:

• Middleware over apps

• APIs over brands

• Embedded distribution over direct sales

• Transparency over trust

• Enterprise buyers over retail hype
  

Crypto’s speculative phase attracted attention. Its infrastructure phase will attract capital that stays.

For founders, Max’s journey reinforces a hard truth: survival often requires abandoning the story you started with and building the one the market actually needs. For investors, it’s a reminder that the most durable crypto companies often look boring from the outside and indispensable from the inside. 

Watch the full interview here