if you ask someone what they’re doing onchain every day, they are less likely to be interacting with raw protocols anymore. they’re using crypto apps. many of them mobile.

it’s world app, base, and fomo. it’s betting on polymarket, scrolling farcaster and launching clankers, coining content on zora, copy trading on interface/share, or streaming/trading on pump.fun. it’s dm’ing crypto agents like bankr within social feeds or trading HL perps on phantom/rainbow. soon you will be saving on aave. we are watching a massive shift happen in real-time, and i’m not sure people fully understand that this is the future of the onchain economy.

for years, we talked about infrastructure. now, the infrastructure has finally converged to make the mobile application layer possible. you have stablecoins proliferating, privy for seamless custody, fast chains for instant settlement, and fiat on-ramps that actually work. you can download an app, load up to $500 with apple pay without a kyc, and you are live. you are transacting.

the tooling has abstracted away the hard stuff without abstracting away crypto, and what’s left is just an experience that people want to use.

and these crypto apps are natively global from day one.

in the web2 world, you hit cultural and logistical walls immediately. in the U.S., we use instagram and imessage. in China, they use wechat. markets are fragmented. but crypto is a global phenomenon. there are no borders for a wallet address. on a crypto app, your audience is the entire world, instantly. that creates a velocity you just can’t replicate in traditional tech verticals.

we are already seeing this with the numbers. according to a16z, we have around 40 to 50 million monthly active users on mobile wallets alone. that is a real user base, and the next iteration of crypto is just going to be more apps across some new verticals.

experiences that blur between entertainment and finance:

• prediction markets, betting on outcomes

• agentic entertainment, bonding with onchain agents and compete to solve their riddles for crypto rewards

• crypto neobanks, deposit stablecoins/tokens and spend them with a debit card to earn rewards

• ICOs, pooling into early token launches and onchain fund raises

crypto apps are becoming the new distribution layer. look at monad. part of why that ecosystem succeeded this week is because people didn't have to suffer through the old hurdles. the apps enabled the network.

compare that to 2021, when buying a $100 nft basically required a phd in binance and metamask.

we are in this amazing phase where the vision of crypto as infrastructure for apps is finally upon us. it doesn't matter what the prices are doing today; the rails are built. we have fast networks, we have stablecoins, and we have mobile experiences that feel like magic.

this is the dream scenario. we are moving toward a world of converging applications that financialize attention, give global access to assets, and build experiences people actually want to come back to.