Having built both a centralized exchange and a decentralized exchange, I've watched the same pattern twice: hype inflates valuations, a correction wipes out the tourists, and what remains is infrastructure that quietly keeps running.
The teams that survive a hype cycle are the ones who treated the technology as infrastructure from the start, not as a fundraising narrative. Compliance, security and liquidity depth were the boring fundamentals that mattered.
If you are building in this space today, ask yourself whether your product would still make sense with the token price at zero. If the answer is no, you have a speculation vehicle, not a company.