Here's a fact that should make you pause: in the entire history of naval warfare, only one nation has ever successfully built and operated nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at scale. The United States launched USS Enterprise in 1961, and today operates eleven nuclear carriers while the rest of the world operates exactly zero.

This isn't for lack of trying.

The Soviet Union, despite being a nuclear superpower that could level cities and put men in space, never built a single nuclear carrier. Their Admiral Kuznetsov, launched in 1985, runs on conventional power and has spent more time broken down than operational. When Russia inherited it, the ship became a floating symbol of technological gap, literally trailing black smoke across the Mediterranean, breaking down so frequently that it travels with its own tugboat.

China, the world's second-largest economy, didn't even attempt to build carriers from scratch initially. They bought the unfinished Soviet carrier Varyag from Ukraine in 1998 (officially for use as a "floating casino") and spent over a decade reverse-engineering it into the Liaoning. Even today, their domestically built carriers use conventional propulsion and ski-jump takeoffs rather than the catapult systems that define modern carrier operations.

The British, who practically invented the aircraft carrier, had to retire their last conventional carrier and now operate two new carriers that can't even launch fixed-wing aircraft without American-made F-35s. The French have exactly one nuclear carrier, Charles de Gaulle, which took 11 years to build and has been plagued with problems since launch.

The aircraft carrier represents the ultimate systems engineering challenge. It's not just about building a floating runway, it's about creating a mobile city that can project power anywhere in the world. The nuclear propulsion isn't just an engine; it's a closed ecosystem requiring decades of institutional knowledge about reactor design, naval architecture, metallurgy, and operational doctrine.

When China bought that Ukrainian carrier hull, they weren't just buying steel and blueprints. They were missing the accumulated knowledge of how American naval engineers learned to balance the competing demands of reactor cooling, electromagnetic catapults, defensive systems, and aviation fuel storage in a single hull that can operate for 25 years without refueling.

The Soviets had brilliant engineers and unlimited resources, but they approached carrier design from a fundamentally different strategic philosophy. Their carriers were designed as guided missile cruisers with flight decks, not as pure aviation platforms. This doctrinal difference meant that even when they had access to similar technologies, they built something entirely different.

This brings me back to crypto, because I think we're seeing the same phenomenon play out in real time.

Uniswap didn't win the DEX wars by having the best trading interface or lowest fees. It won by solving the fundamental liquidity bootstrapping problem through automated market makers and constant product curves. While others tried to replicate traditional order book models in a decentralized environment, Uniswap created an entirely new mechanism that was native to blockchain constraints. The result wasn't just "decentralized trading", it was a new category of financial primitive that enabled composability in ways that traditional exchanges never could.

Similarly, Aave emerged as a lending protocol winner not by copying Compound's interest rate models, but by building more defensible moats around risk management and capital efficiency. Flash loans, credit delegation, and their sophisticated liquidation mechanisms created a lending infrastructure that couldn't be easily replicated. While dozens of lending forks appeared, Aave's institutional-grade risk parameters and governance processes created switching costs that simple code copying couldn't overcome.

Look at Hyperliquid's approach to building a derivatives DEX. They didn't just fork existing AMM code or copy a perps protocol architecture. They built their own L1 (on top of Ethereum and Arbitrum of course) specifically optimized for derivatives trading, with native order matching and a completely different approach to liquidity provision. The result isn't just another "decentralized Binance", it's a fundamentally new category of trading infrastructure that couldn't exist by simply copying what came before.

Or consider the stablecoin wars, which perfectly mirror the carrier competition. There are literally 10+ major stablecoin projects, each claiming to solve the same problem with minor variations. We have USDC, USDT, USDe, USDS, FRAX, UST (RIP), LUSD, and countless others. Most are essentially trying to build the same aircraft carrier with slightly different deck layouts. USDC has regulatory compliance, USDT has incumbency, USDS has decentralization, FRAX has algorithmic mechanisms, but they're all fundamentally trying to solve dollar parity with minor defensive moats.

This mirrors exactly what happened with aircraft carriers in the post-WWII era. Britain, France, and Italy all built conventional carriers in the 1950s and 60s: HMS Eagle, Clemenceau, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, each claiming unique advantages. The British had angled decks, the French had better aviation fuel systems, the Italians had more efficient hull designs. But they were all fundamentally building the same thing: conventional carriers that couldn't match the operational capabilities of nuclear propulsion. Today, most of these ships are either scrapped or converted to helicopter carriers, because their minor defensive advantages couldn't overcome the fundamental limitation of needing to refuel.

The stablecoin space feels identical. Everyone's building slightly different versions of the same product, with marginally different risk profiles and governance mechanisms, while missing the bigger picture of what dollar-stable value transfer should actually become in a crypto-native world.

Stripe's Tempo is fascinating precisely because they're not trying to copy what already exists. They're bringing traditional payments infrastructure expertise into crypto rails, creating something that leverages their existing moats rather than competing directly with native crypto solutions. (I still don't buy it for several reasons we've all seen on social media this week but it will be fun to see how it plays out)

Just as nuclear carrier technology requires institutional knowledge that can't be easily transferred, building successful crypto products requires understanding systems that exist nowhere else. How do you design token economics that remain stable through multiple market cycles? How do you build governance systems that can evolve without forking the community? How do you create user experiences that abstract away blockchain complexity without sacrificing the properties that make crypto valuable in the first place?

This knowledge isn't in whitepapers or repositories. It's in the accumulated experience of teams that have shipped products, seen them break under load, and iterated through multiple market environments. It's in understanding not just how to write smart contracts, but how those contracts behave when gas prices spike, when validators misbehave, or when economic incentives shift.

But here's where the analogy gets really interesting. Aircraft carriers aren't just about projecting military power, they're about creating mobile ecosystems that can operate independently anywhere in the world. The successful carriers integrate everything from power generation to waste management to medical facilities into a single, self-sustaining system.

The crypto products that will reach hyperscale aren't just financial tools, they're platforms that integrate multiple layers of gamification, social interaction, and value creation into cohesive experiences. The companies that understand this won't just survive the next wave; they'll define it.

DeFi protocols are evolving into gaming platforms. NFT marketplaces are becoming social networks. Infrastructure providers are building entire virtual economies. The winners aren't copying individual features, they're creating new categories entirely.

The US maintains its carrier supremacy not because the technology is secret, but because the technology is irreducibly complex. It requires mastering multiple domains simultaneously and integrating them in ways that can't be easily replicated.

The same is true for successful crypto products. They're not successful because they're closed source or because they're using secret algorithms. They're successful because they've solved integration problems that require deep understanding of cryptography, economics, user psychology, regulatory compliance, and social coordination.

You can copy the smart contract code, but you can't copy the accumulated user trust. You can replicate the user interface, but you can't replicate the network effects. You can fork the protocol, but you can't fork the community and institutional knowledge that makes it valuable.

The companies building the next generation of crypto infrastructure understand this. They're not trying to build better versions of what already exists, they're building entirely new categories of products that integrate crypto-native properties with gamification, social mechanics, and user experiences that didn't exist before.

And just like aircraft carriers, the ones who get it right first will maintain their advantage for decades to come.