The CCS Interview Index: what 1,084 founder conversations say about where crypto is building, 2018 to 2026
Twelve years of Crypto Coin Show founder interviews treated as a dataset: topic shares by year show AI and tokenization displacing the NFT and gaming cycle, with regulation and stablecoins at multi-year highs in 2026.
Key findings
- AI went from under 4% of founder interviews in every year through 2023 to 41% in 2026, the fastest shift of any topic in twelve years of the archive.
- Tokenization and real-world assets rose from 4% of episodes in 2023 to 38% in 2026, and Regulation & Policy tripled over the same period, as the founder pipeline turned institutional.
- The 2021 to 2022 consumer cycle has unwound completely: Web3 & NFT projects fell from 50% of episodes to 7%, and Gaming & Metaverse from 19% to zero.
- Episode volume peaked at 221 in 2022, halved in 2023 and has run at roughly 85 a year since; the archive now holds 1,084 published conversations with 995 guests from 895 companies.
- Only one in ten guests has appeared more than once, and the archive's most frequent guests recorded most of their appearances before 2023, so the current cohort is largely new relationships.
- Bitcoin-focused episodes show no trend, oscillating between 5% and 26% with the halving and ETF cycles, while stablecoins and payments hit a nine-year high of 22% in 2026.
Crypto Coin Show has recorded long-form interviews with founders, executives and investors in digital assets since 2014. This report treats that archive as a dataset. Each of the 1,084 episodes currently published on cryptocoinshow.com carries topic, company and guest tags, and because the interviews were booked in real time, week by week, as projects sought coverage, the mix of what founders wanted to talk about is a reasonable proxy for where builders and their backers were putting effort in any given year. It is not a survey and it is not a market share measure. It is a record of who showed up to pitch, and about what.
The archive at a glance
The on-site archive holds 1,084 published episodes after a 2026 cleanup that removed duplicates, short summary cuts and a small number of guests the desk no longer stands behind; the channel has recorded more than 1,500 conversations in total. Output peaked in 2022 at 221 episodes, more than four a week, before falling by more than half in 2023 as the bear market emptied the pipeline. The 2024 to 2026 run rate has settled at roughly 85 episodes a year.
The archive spans 995 named guests and 895 companies. Repeat appearances are rare: 99 guests, one in ten, have appeared more than once, and only one company, XYO Network, has been on the show ten times. That breadth is the point of the dataset. It is not a panel of the same twenty people; it is a rolling census of whoever was raising, launching or lobbying that month.
What founders talked about, year by year
Every episode carries one or more of seventeen topic tags. The table shows the share of each year’s episodes carrying a tag, so a row reads as “what proportion of that year’s founders were working on this.” Because most episodes carry two or three tags, columns sum to more than 100 percent. Cells shaded green or red mark a swing of eight points or more against the prior year.
| Topic | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 3% | 2% | 3% | 3% | 2% | 4% | 21% | 35% | 41% |
| RWA & Tokenization | 10% | 11% | 11% | 7% | 7% | 4% | 19% | 25% | 38% |
| Regulation & Policy | 10% | 8% | 18% | 5% | 8% | 16% | 8% | 15% | 25% |
| Stablecoins & Payments | 19% | 12% | 14% | 14% | 8% | 14% | 14% | 18% | 22% |
| DePIN & Infrastructure | 12% | 22% | 20% | 16% | 14% | 20% | 23% | 24% | 32% |
| DeFi | 7% | 4% | 14% | 54% | 46% | 21% | 40% | 40% | 27% |
| Web3 & NFTs | 19% | 12% | 16% | 35% | 50% | 38% | 29% | 17% | 7% |
| Gaming & Metaverse | 5% | 2% | 2% | 14% | 19% | 13% | 5% | 2% | 0% |
| Layer 1 & Layer 2 | 14% | 22% | 17% | 26% | 23% | 23% | 31% | 25% | 18% |
| Institutional & Investing | 22% | 15% | 16% | 6% | 7% | 12% | 18% | 17% | 15% |
| Exchanges & Wallets | 22% | 18% | 17% | 14% | 14% | 19% | 11% | 13% | 8% |
| Bitcoin | 9% | 14% | 26% | 5% | 7% | 18% | 12% | 19% | 11% |
| Security & Privacy | 9% | 14% | 19% | 13% | 13% | 14% | 17% | 18% | 21% |
| Trading & Markets | 10% | 10% | 18% | 13% | 9% | 7% | 7% | 11% | 15% |
Four shifts the data makes plain
AI went from absent to the single largest theme in three years
From 2018 through 2023, between two and four percent of episodes touched AI at all, and those were mostly data-marketplace and oracle projects using the word loosely. In 2024 the share jumped to 21 percent, then 35 percent in 2025 and 41 percent so far in 2026. No other tag in the archive has moved that far that fast. The projects behind it are agent frameworks, decentralized compute and data provenance networks, and miners converting sites to GPU hosting, which is why the DePIN and Infrastructure tag rose alongside it to a record 32 percent.
Tokenization is the second-fastest riser and it came from the institutional side
Real-world asset and tokenization projects were a steady ten percent of the archive through 2020, sank to four percent at the bottom of the 2023 bear market, and have since climbed to 19, 25 and now 38 percent. The 2018 cohort was security token platforms pitching retail; the 2025 and 2026 cohort is tokenized Treasury funds, private credit and settlement infrastructure pitching institutions. Regulation and Policy tracks the same curve, at 25 percent in 2026 against eight percent two years earlier, and Stablecoins and Payments is at a nine-year high of 22 percent. Together those three tags describe an industry whose founders are now selling to banks and regulators rather than to each other.
The 2021 to 2022 cycle has fully unwound
Web3 and NFT projects were half of all episodes in 2022. They are seven percent in 2026. Gaming and Metaverse went from 19 percent to zero over the same period. DeFi, which peaked at 54 percent in 2021, is still a substantial 27 percent, but its composition has changed from yield farms and new automated market makers to lending infrastructure, perpetuals venues and protocols positioning for institutional collateral. The archive suggests the consumer-speculative cycle did not shrink; it left, and its founders were replaced by a different population.
Bitcoin is a constant, not a trend
Bitcoin-focused episodes have oscillated between five and 26 percent with no directional trend, spiking in 2020 (halving and corporate treasuries) and 2023 (ordinals and the ETF filings) and settling at 11 percent in 2026. Institutional and Investing shows a similar shape: 22 percent in 2018 when the guests were funds and OTC desks, six percent at the retail peak of 2021, back to 15 to 18 percent since 2024. The interview desk’s own repositioning toward institutional coverage in 2025 and 2026 accounts for some of that recovery and should be read as part of the signal, not separate from it.
What this means for coverage in 2026
Three implications follow. First, the founder pipeline is now dominated by AI-adjacent infrastructure and tokenization, and a news desk that still allocates coverage by 2022’s map is covering the wrong industry. Second, the regulation tag’s climb is not only US market structure legislation; a growing share of 2026 guests are European and Asian companies structuring around MiCA and Hong Kong and Singapore regimes, which is a distribution question for any English-language outlet. Third, the collapse in repeat guests after 2022 (the archive’s most frequent guests all recorded most of their appearances before 2023) means relationships have to be rebuilt with a new cohort, and the company hub pages on this site are the desk’s answer to that.
Methodology and limitations
Dataset: every published episode on cryptocoinshow.com as of September 29, 2026 (n = 1,084), with recording date, guest, company and topic tags. Topic and entity tags were assigned in 2026 by a language model reading each episode’s transcript and description against a fixed list of seventeen topics, then spot-checked by the desk; 975 episodes carry more than one topic. Shares are per year of recording. The archive under-represents 2014 to 2017 because early episodes were not retained, and 2026 is a partial year. Episode counts reflect what CCS chose to record and what survived cleanup, so the data describes the show’s pipeline rather than the industry as a whole; the pipeline is, however, driven by inbound requests from projects and their PR firms, which is why we treat it as a demand signal. Raw counts are available on request for academic and journalistic use.
Crypto Coin Show Research publishes original analysis built from CCS's own archive and public data. Figures are as stated at publication and are not investment advice. Reuse with attribution and a link.