Nouriel Roubini says the overwhelming majority of crypto projects are built on nothing, and that nearly two decades of blockchain development stemming from Bitcoin has produced exactly one legitimate use case.

Speaking on the BeInCrypto Expert Council podcast alongside Atlas Capital CEO Reza Bundy and Securitize founder Carlos Domingo, the economist known as “Dr. Doom” delivered a blunt post-mortem on the ICO era and the altcoin market as a whole.

A Massive Failure Rate With Fraud Baked In

Roubini’s accounting of the ICO boom left little to salvage. Of the 20,000 Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) ever launched, he said the damage runs far deeper than market losses alone.

“There have been 20,000 ICOs, 80% of them were scam in the first place… A lot of stuff is backed by nothing. It’s totally vaporware. It’s based just on faith.”

The math compounds from there. Of the remaining non-fraudulent projects, Roubini argues 70% lost all their value. Then, among the small fraction still standing, including most of the top 10 cryptocurrencies, they have shed 50 to 60% from their all-time highs.

Indeed, Bitcoin dropped below $60,000 briefly on June 24, more than 50% down from its all-time high of $126,080.

His verdict: nearly everything built on-chain represents a speculative bet on faith rather than a claim on any real asset or utility. The history of ICO fraud bears this out, from pump-and-dump schemes at launch to projects that vanished entirely after raising funds.

Roubini has levelled similar criticism at the crypto space for years, including a 2019 face-off with Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in which he called the ecosystem overcentralized and riddled with manipulation. He also testified before the US Congress, calling blockchain the least useful technology in human history.

Stablecoins: One App Left Standing

Despite writing off the vast majority of the market, Roubini identified one product that genuinely works.

“After almost 20 years of Bitcoin, what’s the big killer app in crypto? Stablecoins.”

His endorsement comes with a caveat. Stablecoins, he argues, are simply a digital wrapper around fiat currency and therefore carry the same debasement risks. They work as a payment rail, particularly for users in high-inflation economies, but they generate no real return and offer no hedge against the monetary risks that originally made crypto appealing.

That distinction, useful for payments but limited as a store of value, underpins his argument for tokenized real-world assets as the next step.

The podcast appearance marks a notable evolution for Roubini, who previously dismissed all crypto as fraud in public forums. His position now separates speculative tokens, which he still regards as backed by nothing, from tokenized assets with verifiable, real-world collateral.

If Roubini’s numbers hold, the altcoin market’s long-run track record amounts to a near-total loss across 20,000 projects, with stablecoins as the only durable output of the entire experiment.

Source: BeInCrypto