On April 22, SpaceX announced a partnership with AI programming tool Cursor, acquiring the rights to acquire it for $60 billion. This valuation of Cursor has more than doubled from approximately $29.3 billion in November of last year. This news brought a name that had gradually faded from view back into the spotlight – SBF. In 2022, SBF's Alameda Research invested $200,000 in Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, acquiring approximately 5% of its shares. After FTX's bankruptcy liquidation, this stake was disposed of at the original price. Based on the current $60 billion valuation, if held until now, it would be worth approximately $3 billion. Over the past year, the valuations of AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI have repeatedly reached new highs, and the AI sector continues to heat up. In the AI field, Cursor is just a small investment among SBF's many bets; its largest bet is Anthropic. Currently, Anthropic is in negotiations for a new round of financing, with some VC offers corresponding to a valuation as high as $800 billion. In February of this year, the company just completed a financing round with a valuation of $380 billion; data from the secondary market platform Caplight shows that its outstanding shares are valued at approximately $688 billion. SBF led Anthropic's Series B round with $500 million, holding approximately 8% of the shares. Based on the current $380 billion valuation, this investment, if not liquidated, would be worth over $30 billion. However, the liquidation team sold in batches, ultimately realizing only $1.4 billion. Time has proven that SBF may be one of the most successful AI investors in the crypto space. In 2021, the AI boom had not yet arrived, ChatGPT was still a year away from release, and Anthropic had just spun off from OpenAI. Few were willing to bet $500 million on this startup. Cursor was virtually unknown at the time. Beyond AI, his foresight was equally ahead of the market: when Solana was still a niche project, he built a position at an average price of $8, with a peak unrealized profit of approximately $2.1 billion; his 7.5% stake in Robinhood is currently valued at approximately $10 billion; and his $100 million investment in Mysten Labs has now appreciated by over $800 million. If these assets had not been confiscated, their total value could now be in the tens of billions of dollars. SBF was a big winner of that era, his net worth once exceeding $16 billion, earning him a place on the Forbes rich list and being treated as a guest of honor by Washington politicians. Even today, in 2026, his name is still frequently mentioned. Especially in the current crypto world, an inexplicable sense of loss is spreading. Frequent hacker attacks, AAVE's bad debt crisis with $15.1 billion flowing out in three and a half days, and ordinary users' assets being temporarily locked; the prices of DeFi blue-chip coins such as UNI, AAVE, MKR, and CRV are severely decoupled from their fundamentals. Veteran players remarked, "This time, it's different from before.""The grand narratives are collapsing one after another—DeFi, NFTs, blockchain games… With each wave receding, only more fatigue and less trust remain. The narrative's golden age is visibly shrinking, from two years to one year, then to just a few months, with fewer and fewer people able to capitalize on the first wave. Early opportunities are also narrowing. On the one hand, on-chain data is highly transparent, smart money movements are almost real-time traceable, and the information gap window is drastically shortening. VCs have already locked up low-priced tokens, and retail investors often end up with tokens valued at tens of times their initial investment during TGE. On the other hand, cases of market makers colluding with project teams to manipulate token prices are commonplace, and the credibility of price signals themselves is declining. Even the hype surrounding Memecoin is fading, crypto VCs are generally turning to low-risk arbitrage, and the entire industry is becoming 'boring.' The industry's sense of loss is evident. But are people really missing SBF himself? When FTX collapsed, approximately one million creditors suffered heavy losses, and ordinary depositors' assets were wiped out overnight. SBF misappropriated customer funds and falsified balance sheets, ultimately being sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud." A 10-year prison sentence. It left behind not only a wealth myth, but also countless bank statements showing people lost everything. SBF was the most extreme symbol of that time, and FTX's collapse, to some extent, accelerated the end of that era. What people truly miss is that unique sense of energy—big news and breakthroughs every day, opportunities for ordinary people, rules not yet fully written, blank spaces everywhere, crypto overshadowing AI, VC still a whale-hunting game, risks and rewards coexisting, opportunities rife with unpriced opportunities. However, that era where most people could get a piece of the pie is over. Yet, the crypto industry is far from extinct. As the old narrative collapses, a new one is quietly growing, especially in the intersection of AI and crypto, which is far from being fully priced. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) recently pointed out in a Binance Square AMA that although AI is currently attracting a lot of funding and attention, this has actually left more long-term builders for the crypto industry, an environment beneficial to the industry's long-term development. Several VC executives also expressed similar sentiments in 2026. The year-end outlook reached a consensus: "The era of spray-and-pray is over," and 2026 will be the year where "Execution, Not Hype" determines success. Capital is shifting from chasing hype to supporting builders with real business models, strong execution, and long-term patience. As Andrei Grachev, co-founder of DWF Labs, said, the market is currently in a "very boring" phase, but it is not dying out, and there is still much to do as a builder or investor.Small investors should maintain a learning mindset, avoid getting caught up in the market frenzy, and enjoy the market they've chosen to enter. [ChainCatcher]