New technologies always begin in chaos.

Nobody knows what to build, what form it should take, or which approach will dominate. Experiments explode, visions collide, believers stake everything. Then the "Ford moment" comes: one approach wins, defines the standard, and everyone else follows.

The early automobile industry provides the perfect illustration. In 1905, nobody could tell you what a car was supposed to look like.

At the turn of the 20th century, three competing technologies vied for dominance: steam, electric, and gasoline-powered vehicles. Each had fervent supporters and legitimate advantages. Hundreds of manufacturers across the Western world experimented with wildly different designs, each certain their vision represented the future. It was chaos, but creative chaos.

Then came Henry Ford. In 1913, Ford combined interchangeable parts with subdivided labor and fluid movement of materials to create his moving assembly line. The Model T wasn't just a car; it was a manufacturing philosophy. It was Ford's first automobile mass-produced on moving assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts, marketed to the middle class.

Ford standardized what a car was.

The Model T defined the form factor, the internal combustion engine became the standard, and the assembly line became the template for how cars would be built for the next century. Steam cars declined after the adoption of the electric starter and Ford's mass production techniques, which made conventional automobiles both cheap and reliable.

After that, people copied the design in their own style and iterated from there. Thats how adoption begins. The Internet did the same thing. When the internet emerged, dozens of web browsers competed for dominance, with '

Marc Andreesen's Mosaic (later Netscape) becoming particularly easy to use and often credited with sparking the internet boom of the 1990s. But that was just the beginning of the experimentation phase.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, nobody truly knew what the internet was for. Would it be a publishing platform? A communication tool? A shopping mall? A virtual world? Every tech company had a different vision. AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Netscape, and countless startups all pursued wildly different approaches. The experimentation was necessary.

Through trial and error, the market discovered what worked: search engines, social networks, e-commerce, streaming media. Each category eventually found its "Ford moment" - Google for search, Amazon for e-commerce, Facebook for social networking. These weren't necessarily the first or the best technologies, but they were the ones that figured out the complete system: the user experience, the business model, and the scalability.

This is precisely the phase that crypto is in currently.

We're in the early 1900s of blockchain technology, with hundreds of competing visions, protocols, and use cases. Crypto's current solidified use case has been DeFi. This is why we see so many perps platforms, neobanks, yield aggregators, and lending protocols popping up—it's because it works.

Just as electric vehicles had clear advantages in the early 1900s, DeFi has demonstrated genuine utility: permissionless lending, automated market makers, yield farming, and global access to financial services without intermediaries. The infrastructure is working, the experiments have validated the concept, and the category has found product-market fit.

We're watching specific crypto use cases find their Ford moments right now. Stablecoins took years of failed experiments. Remember Basis shutting down after raising $133 million, or the dozens of algorithmic stablecoins that collapsed? before USDT and USDC's simple full collateralization model won. Now they're processing over $1 trillion per month, replacing Western Union's 5-10% fees and 3-5 day waits with instant transfers for pennies.

Prediction markets struggled for years with regulatory crackdowns (Intrade) and usability issues (Augur) before Polymarket and Kalshi figured it out, accurately predicting the 2024 election results and calling Biden's withdrawal weeks early.

And recently crypto neobanks, platforms like KAST, Plasma, Tria, EtherFi, and UR, are bridging the gap between traditional banking and DeFi, letting users earn 10%+ yields on stablecoins while spending with Visa cards in 150+ countries. This is redefining what traditional banks offered; they're something new entirely. They let you save, spend, send, and earn from one place, combining the ease of traditional banking with the control of DeFi, a completely new and exciting experience. Neobank transaction values are projected to climb from $6.37 trillion in 2024 to $10.44 trillion by 2028, and while only 15% of the 272+ neobanks worldwide are expected to break even, the winners are training an entire generation to expect financial services that work instantly, globally, and mobile-first—exactly what crypto promises.

DeFi works, but what about consumer crypto?

Consumer crypto: the thing your grandmother uses without realizing it's blockchain, hasn't emerged yet.

This area is still blurry. What really works for everyday users? Nobody knows yet. We see fragments of potential: NFTs showed there's cultural appetite for digital ownership, even if the first wave was mostly speculation. Gaming experiments hint at new ownership models. Social tokens suggest shifts in creator economies. This is why experimentation is encouraged. Someone needs to build the wrong thing fifty times before they build the right thing once.

Most consumer crypto experiments will fail. They should fail. That's how you find what works.

Ford wasn't the first person to build a car, he was just the first to figure out the system that made cars accessible to everyone. The same pattern will play out in crypto.

Somewhere out there, a team is building the product so intuitive your grandmother can use it, so essential people wonder how they lived without it. It might not be the first try. It might not even be the tenth. But when it happens, it will help define crypto for the next decade.

So keep building. The Ford moment of consumer crypto is still up for grabs.