The crypto industry is likely to see more projects snapped up by larger companies, which may lead to a much less fragmented sector in the months ahead, says Bullish CEO Tom Farley.
“I was in the exchange sector during continual massive consolidation…the same thing is going to happen starting right now in crypto,” Farley said during an interview on CNBC on Friday.
Farley, who served as president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) until 2018, said the recent drop in the crypto market will be a key catalyst, with Bitcoin (BTC) down nearly 45% from its October all-time high of $126,100 and trading at $69,405 at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap
Farley says the consolidation should have already happened
However, he said that the industry’s consolidation should have happened earlier, but inflated valuations kept false optimism going. “It should have happened a year or two ago,” he said.
“People were still holding onto this hope that they’d get 2020 valuations, and so we’d have conversations with companies that would say, hey, we have $10 million in revenue, it’s not growing, we want $200 million to buy the company,” he said.
“That dream is going to be over,” Farley said, adding that “people are going to realize they don’t have businesses, they have products, and they need to merge up, and they need to scale, and that is going to happen.”
Consolidation in the crypto industry can cut both ways. Underperforming projects may be absorbed by larger companies, but this process can lead to redundancies, layoffs, and internal disruption in the industry as companies merge or wind down.
Related: Crypto retail investors are trying to ‘meta-analyze’ crypto crash: Santiment
Eva Oberholzer, the chief investment officer at venture capital firm Ajna Capital, told Cointelegraph in September 2025 that VC firms have become much more selective with the crypto projects they invest in, due to market maturation.
“It’s harder because we have reached a different stage in crypto, similar to every cycle we have seen for other technologies in the past,” Oberholzer told Cointelegraph.
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