Venture capital and startups adapt as solo founders scale faster with AI-driven development.
After gaining traction across big tech, “vibe coding” is quickly spilling into crypto, and it could fundamentally alter how Web3 projects are built, funded, and scaled.
Coined by former OpenAI co-founder and ex-Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy in early 2025, vibe coding describes building software by “feel.” It utilizes natural language or voice prompts with AI systems, while barely requiring the use of the keyboard.
The idea went mainstream after Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its Word of the Year for 2025, signaling how fast the concept has entered the tech space.
At its core, vibe coding collapses the distance between idea and execution. With tools like Cursor, Claude, and Lovable, founders can describe what they want in plain English and receive production-ready code in real time.
Beyond speeding up development, it redefines who can build software in the first place. According to Web3 investor and builder Simon Kim, it flips the traditional startup skill hierarchy.
Engineering depth, once the most critical bottleneck, is increasingly handled by AI. Human founders now compete on breadth: business judgment, user intuition, product taste, and narrative clarity.
“The founder’s role shifts from writer to editor-in-chief or film director,” Kim argued, with success determined by how well one curates, connects, and directs AI-generated outputs.
Kim’s own experience illustrates the shift. He reportedly built an Ethereum valuation dashboard applying 12 valuation models in just four hours. Kim claims to have also created a tourism prototype for Abu Dhabi during a single flight.
Both would previously have required weeks of coordination and development. Instead, they were quickly deployed and used in real-world conversations with decision-makers.
This pattern is already visible at scale. Lovable, a natural-language app builder launched in 2024, reportedly hit $100 million in ARR within eight months and raised $330 million in late 2025 at a $6.6 billion valuation.
At Y Combinator, 25% of Winter 2025 startups reportedly had codebases that were more than 95% AI-generated.
“You don’t need teams of 50 or 100 engineers. You can raise less, and capital lasts much longer,” Kim reported, citing YC CEO Garry Tan.
The implications may be even sharper for Web3. Blockchain infrastructure already allows small teams to operate at a global scale.
Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives exchange with an 11-person core team, processed roughly $3 trillion in trading volume in 2025 and generated an estimated $844 million in revenue.
By replacing TradFi infrastructure with smart contracts and on-chain logic, it demonstrates how minimal teams plus automation can rival or outperform legacy giants.
As execution becomes commoditized, however, defensibility shifts elsewhere. Code is increasingly easy to replicate, features are cloned within weeks, and AI erodes local advantages like language and geography. What remains hard to copy are communities, brands, trust, and global networks.
This logic is already native to crypto. Web3 winners rarely dominate solely because of superior code. They win on culture, memes, and engaged communities.
“Technology can be forked, but culture cannot,” Kim noted, alluding to a lesson Web3 learned years before AI made it universal.
Venture capital is feeling the pressure, too. If solo founders can build and validate products independently, capital is no longer the primary constraint.
Trust, distribution, and access become the real scarcity. Kim argues VCs must evolve into “super connectors,” offering credibility, global introductions, and dense peer networks rather than slow fundraising processes and generic advice.
Against this backdrop, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju encourages crypto natives to try vibe coding, even if they have no prior programming experience. The on-chain expert argues that the industry is shifting “from the age of execution to the age of imagination.”
Builders like IBuyRugs and Kiki indicate that plain-English prompts can now generate functional dApps with built-in monetization.
As AI democratizes execution, advantage flows to taste, vision, and networks, at least insofar as crypto is concerned.
This is amid a sector where community already outweighs code, with vibe coding capable of accelerating a future defined by solo founders, global-first protocols, and community-driven moats.
