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Griša Černe and Hiroki Kotabe
The crypto ecosystem is accelerating at the intersection of technological innovation and user-driven demand. Over the past few years, infrastructure has made remarkable progress: scaling solutions like modular blockchains, validity rollups, and layer-2 frameworks have progressed from whitepaper concepts to production-grade infrastructure, lowering costs and increasing throughput in ways that were unthinkable five years ago. Yet, alongside these advancements, the memecoin mania of 2024 reveals a persistent truth – speculation and grassroots engagement remain as central to adoption as technological breakthroughs. Crypto lives in this duality: the immediate allure of speculative gains coexists with the steady march toward long-term utility and financial empowerment.
To navigate this complex landscape, we need a clear framework for understanding how speculation, social dynamics, and real-world use cases interact to shape adoption. Here, we outline eight general observations about crypto users and the industry, and then explore six verticals where we see compelling opportunities. This approach reconciles short-term trends with long-term progress, identifying where innovation is likely to create lasting value.
Speculation is a fundamental aspect of human behavior, driven by psychological, social, and systemic forces, with the desire for financial freedom and the ambition to transform one’s economic and social standing at its core. Crypto has become the ultimate arena for these aspirations, offering risk-takers a playground to pursue transformative gains. This speculative energy has fueled the “financialization of everything,” as founders design systems that monetize attention and engagement, exemplified by the rise of token launchpads for memes, AI agents, apps, games, and more. Donald Trump’s memecoin has further demonstrated the unprecedented speed and scale of capital formation in crypto, validating crypto as the most powerful crowdfunding tool ever created. By combining global, permissionless rails with social virality and connectivity, these projects tap into humanity’s innate drive to speculate and gamble together, seeking to transcend traditional financial constraints. As more people recognize this potential, both new and existing participants are likely to exploit it to its fullest extent.
As humans, we gravitate toward like-minded people who share our values or rally behind charismatic leaders who embody traits we admire. Social conformity is particularly evident when forming one’s own opinions is difficult. This behavior manifests as communities where social identity becomes a powerful driver of engagement. Crypto creates an incentive layer on top of age-old social structures and propensities, reimagining community formation and driving forward a new era of product experimentation. As we see across social media and messaging platforms, crypto users increasingly seek products that blend social connectivity with on-chain activities – spaces, where they can connect, share, and discuss in private groups while interacting with these ecosystems. But the technology and tokenomics are too complex or opaque for the average user, so trust often comes from group conviction: if your tribe believes in a chain or a protocol, so will you.
Crypto doesn’t just promise financial upside – it also delivers adrenaline and novelty. Memecoins and 24/7 gaming-like trading platforms exemplify the industry’s overlap with thrill-seeking culture. For young generations priced out of housing and disillusioned with sluggish wages, the prospect of doubling their capital in a few clicks is tempting. Speculative trading transforms into a fast-paced pastime, offering immediacy and excitement like a mobile game. While the majority of these bets fail, the promise of hitting a jackpot fuels the continuous cycle of hype-driven engagement, revealing how entertainment and escapism go hand in hand.
On the other side of crypto, certain tools are starting to provide practical solutions to real problems. Bitcoin has proven to be a useful long-term store of value and tool for wealth generation. Stablecoins are anchoring unstable economies ravaged by inflation and capital restrictions by providing dollar exposure and frictionless cross-border transfers. Meanwhile, blockchain rails are creating new frontiers for accessible finance, from non-custodial lending to micropayments operating around the clock. For builders, the open programmability and global liquidity pools of crypto rails foster cutting-edge fintech products that go far beyond the old paradigm of “buy and hold.”
Safe self-custody promises financial autonomy but one mistake like losing a seed phrase or falling for a phishing attack can wipe out holdings. Retail users often choose convenience-first custodial solutions like CEXs and ETFs to mitigate this risk, despite requiring trust in intermediaries. Institutions, for their part, prioritize compliance, audit trails, and cryptographic proofs of collateral or permissible usage. While expert usage of decentralized protocols provides security and verifiability, there is still a long way to go for the average user to forgo counterparty risk in favor of self-custody.
At the same time, widespread distrust in banks, media, and governments has bled into crypto, exacerbated by high-profile failures like FTX, Celsius, and BlockFi. These fiascos have eroded confidence not only in crypto gatekeepers, but in the very framework through which large amounts of capital flow. Critics point to the weakness of any trust-based model – if you must trust intermediaries to safeguard your assets, you’re vulnerable to human fraud, error, or regulatory overreach. This sentiment has energized a new wave of retail participants “boxed out” of private sales who see open token distributions and fair launches as the only advantageous path forward – a return to the original “institution-free” ethos of crypto. The challenge now is reconciling this growing demand for trustless systems with the need for accessible security that drives non-experts to reputable centralized platforms.
While decentralization is a core tenet of crypto, most newcomers prioritize usability and efficiency over ideological purity. Centralized exchanges and platforms continue to dominate because they offer the ease of use necessary to onboard retail users and drive adoption. Memecoins are another example, playing a key role in bringing new participants into the ecosystem, precisely because they are simple, viral, and accessible. For crypto to cross the chasm into mainstream adoption, convenience must come first. Ideally, a blockchain would balance decentralization, security, and performance – but in practice, the average user gravitates toward what works seamlessly, often overlooking or ignoring centralization risks. But when centralization fails, decentralization has the chance to demonstrate its value. The path forward isn’t to reject convenience for ideology, but to work toward embedding more decentralized and secure protocols beneath intuitive interfaces, enabling mainstream users to benefit from trustless infrastructure without sacrificing usability.
Word of friendlier regulatory stances in major jurisdictions boosts user sentiment – even if laws are likely to remain in flux in the near term. A proposed Bitcoin strategic reserve or the approval of a spot crypto ETF can send optimism soaring. American politics around Bitcoin and stablecoin adoption have grabbed headlines, with many seeing it as a final push for big financial institutions to embrace on-chain assets. Some of the enthusiasm is grounded in actual policy clarity. The EU’s MiCA took effect, Singapore expanded licensing, and more banks filed for crypto custody. Each sign of acceptance reduces fear of fence-sitters considering exposure to crypto. If governments indeed finalize frameworks that legitimize crypto, it could pave the way for a larger wave of user adoption, especially among risk-averse retail and institutional investors.
The user behaviors and market realities outlined above – ranging from raw speculation and tribal user engagement to deeper needs for financial utility and security – define the lens through which we identify our highest-conviction opportunities. While these observations expose some of crypto’s current limitations and pitfalls, they also set the stage for the breakthroughs we expect. Without problems, there are no solutions. In the next section, we present six general verticals that stand out as pathways for innovation, growth, and value creation.
Radical improvements in blockchain infrastructure must reconcile high throughput, robust security, and user-friendliness without compromising privacy. Infrastructure is steadily progressing with incremental improvements and consolidation across these multiple fronts. Yet, every new wave of adoption – often triggered by major catalysts – exposes the underlying systems as fundamentally unprepared to support widespread mainstream usage. Addressing these challenges will require radical breakthroughs by applying and combining advanced cryptographic primitives in novel ways.
Opportunities:
Radical scalability improvements: Architecting next-generation protocols that can handle massive user influx without compromising security. This includes preconfirmations, parallel execution, modular architectures, shared security and its second-order infrastructure experiments, network-layer upgrades, database optimizations, sharding, alternative data availability solutions, and compression to reduce congestion.
ZKP adoption & infrastructure stack: Leveraging new cryptographic primitives for privacy-preserving verification and reducing trust requirements. ZK rollups already run production environments where proofs ensure trust-minimized execution and, depending on network architecture, the possibility of transaction privacy. Tooling around ZK circuits is maturing, opening doors for private DeFi, identity protocols, and enterprise solutions that demand confidential data handling. Proving infrastructure is maturing to handle increasing proving demands and its variety.
Programmable privacy & confidentiality: Building products where users selectively reveal personal data, privatize dapps, and offer plug-and-play solutions for modular programmable privacy. Complementary approaches including ZKPs, FHE, MPC, and TEE are necessary. This includes selective disclosure encoded into smart contracts – with users proving solvency, identity, or compliance without broadcasting their assets or other details. This will be crucial as crypto goes mainstream and full plaintext visibility becomes woefully obvious and exploited.
Interoperability solutions: Linking distinct ecosystems with minimized liquidity fragmentation to further abstract users and assets from the multichain layer. Cross–chain messaging systems that simplify movement of assets and information between chains, moving toward atomic and eventually synchronous composability.
As crypto matures, the demand for tailored, use-case-specific platforms is growing. Users increasingly seek environments optimized for their needs – whether for payments, gaming, alpha hunting, or high-frequency trading – rather than relying on general-purpose platforms that may be insufficient. Special-purpose ecosystems address this by making tradeoffs between performance, security, and decentralizing to deliver focused solutions. These “economic zones” not only lower friction but also foster loyalty by aligning infrastructure with specific user demands and applications.
Opportunities:
Bitcoin Renaissance and programmability: Expanding Bitcoin’s utility beyond its “digital gold” flywheel through L2s and sidechains. These protocols aim to bring programmability to Bitcoin while preserving its security. They unlock new possibilities for Bitcoin DeFi, NFTs, and micropayments on Bitcoin rails, bringing dynamic functionality to Bitcoin.
App-specific chains & L2s: Tailoring blockchains for unique verticals, cutting down on overhead and boosting throughput for targeted use cases. App chains demonstrate how specialization can improve performance and UX by isolating workloads and optimizing parameters for their target use cases – while offering devs greater control over costs and scalability.
Hybrid Platforms: Balancing usability, compliance, and decentralization for institutional and consumer needs. This includes platforms that combine the convenience and performance of centralization while also offering security features of open decentralization.
Analytics Expansion: Real-time analytics to detect token distribution patterns, mindshare, sentiment, real-time risks, and overall transparency. Powering DeFi (and DeFAI) with these data and turning insights into execution readiness, capturing order flow and value on-platform.
Crypto is increasingly proving its capacity to serve as a global, internet-native financial layer, offering fast, secure transactions and programmable functionality. Stablecoins have emerged at the center, enabling borderless dollar exposure in regions with volatile currencies, while DeFi protocols provide novel ways to borrow, lend, and earn yield. Yet the opportunity remains vast: by improving accessibility and efficiency, crypto can replace fragmented financial systems with a unified infrastructure that addresses everyday needs like remittances, savings, and credit.
Opportunities:
Programmable stablecoins & emerging markets: Stablecoins like USDT and USDC are already widely used for cross-border payments and dollar hedging in inflation-prone regions. The next step is yield-bearing stablecoins and advanced programmability for recurring payments (e.g., payroll) or conditional transfers (escrow). These innovations reduce counterparty risk and bring advanced financial tools to unbanked populations globally.
User-friendly DeFi products: DeFi remains limited by complexity and time-consumption – users must navigate wallets, gas fees, numerous platforms, and risk management. Platforms or products that abstract away these frictions with auto-compounding yields, yield aggregation, and simplified (mobile) interfaces are likely to gain adoption. Strategies packaged as products (e.g., USDE) not only abstract DeFi complexities but also boost composability and adoption.
Next-gen payment rails: Payment solutions like Stripe’s integration of stablecoins or Visa’s onchain settlement experiments are bridging crypto with real-world commerce. Going onchain enables instant, low-cost payments for merchants while offering the transparency and programmability of blockchains – the challenge ahead is scaling adoption among businesses that still rely on legacy systems.
Tokenization of RWAs: Digitizing tangible assets to broaden global market access, and increase liquidity and capital efficiency. Experiments are underway to tokenize real-world assets like real estate, art, and commodities to improve liquidity for asset owners and allow retail investors access to previously inaccessible markets.
Emerging DePIN models leverage globally distributed incentives to crowdfund and govern physical infrastructure (e.g., open bandwidth, data, compute, or sensor networks). By gamifying resource contributions, these ecosystems bootstraps supply through user rewards, and distribute ownership among participants. Beyond yield and passive income opportunities, these networks appeal to communities disillusioned with monopolistic gatekeepers, offering both economic rewards and a sense of shared control over critical infrastructure.
Opportunities:
Decentralizing large infrastructure: Token-based ownership that fosters transparent community-led infrastructure. Participants contribute resources (e.g., hotspots, data scraping, compute nodes, storage) and earn tokens in return. Less reliance on single opaque entities and more on transparent, community-led infrastructure ecosystems.
Coordinated sensory robotics: Autonomous robots equipped with sensors can collect high-quality geospatial data, images, and audio readings for applications like mapping or AI training. Blockchain-based decentralized coordination mechanisms can allow these robots to interact through onchain “employment” contracts, ensuring fair compensation for their work. The target is to collect and structure specialized datasets needed for training advanced AI models.
Merging physical and digital: The convergence of blockchain with physical devices (e.g., IoT) enables users to earn rewards for real-world actions, such as capturing environmental data or completing location-specific tasks. As the line between physical and digital blurs, users will demand a more fulfilling ownership experience. Gadgets like smart sensors or AR-enabled devices can be combined with crypto to incentivize and extend user engagement while generating valuable datasets.
Crypto’s next wave of adoption will hinge on its ability to meet users where they are – on platforms that prioritize entertainment, immediacy, and simplicity. Whether its memecoin speculation, prediction markets, or AI-driven interactions, humans tend to gravitate toward experiences that feel intuitive, fun, and rewarding. In an overcrowded space, curation plays an important role here – by offering “quests” or specific recommendations of what to do onchain, apps can redirect users toward a simple set of meaningful onchain actions rather than overwhelming them with infinite possibilities. By abstracting away blockchain complexity through novel interfaces and embedding crypto into familiar contexts like social media and gaming, developers can tap into the general audience that values ease-of-use over ideology.
Opportunities:
Prediction markets & info finance: Prediction markets that go far beyond mere gambling to serve as tools for aggregating and distilling information into actionable insights. Experiments on wisdom of the crowds and collective intelligence.
SocialFi & integration of trading into social media: Embedding token incentives directly into internet-native social interactions and community creation. Users can trade tokens tied to memes, influencers, communities – blending social validation with financial upside. The direction is toward trading and capital formation as a natural extension of social media behavior and the rise of the influencer generation. What will be crucial here is to go beyond short-term traction by incentivizing people with token rewards, and moving toward true retention from fostering meaningful experiences.
Novel UX experiments: Recent advancements in AI and natural language interfaces (e.g., DeFAI) allow users to interact with smart contracts through conversational commands rather than traditional GUIs. As these models improve, their utility will increase while also lowering the barrier to entry for non-technical users.
AI agents are exploding in both hype and capital inflows. Because blockchains are open, composable, and always-on – with every smart contract effectively an open API – AI agents can transact, trade, and eventually collaborate with one another with minimal human intervention. While still in its infancy, as advanced machine learning merges with DeFi, we anticipate a new class of “autonomous workers” that execute tasks and manage capital at machine speed without downtime. Paired with verifiable trust systems (e.g., web proofs (“zkTLS)”, on-chain audits), crypto can be an accelerating – rather than counterbalancing – force for AI. Within this decade, entire rosters of AI could take on everything from trading to content creation, all while receiving – and distributing – payment via smart contracts.
Opportunities
AI infrastructure stack: End-to-end toolkits for model deployment, verifiability, and data sourcing. The backbone of this paradigm shift depends on AI infrastructure that can secure data sharing and computation at scale to power applications like DeFi optimization, fraud detection, and autonomous decision making.
AI agents: Agents that navigate DeFi protocols, NFT exchanges, farming opportunities, or even power robotic workforces using on-chain logic to permissionlessly perform various tasks. These agents can operate continuously, digest copious amounts of information, and respond accordingly without human oversight.
DAOs 2.0: Automation at the center, humans at the edges. DAOs where humans act as the governance layer for defining objectives while AI “members” take action. Eventually, the governance process can become AI-assisted or even fully automated, with humans only defining high-level objectives and boundaries.
Financialized AI-driven services: Tokenizing AI outputs – whether predictive models, analytics, or creative content – opens new revenue streams for developers and users. Users or DAOs can stake tokens to fund AI-based initiatives, while the agents share revenue or performance-based rewards back to stakeholders.
As we reflect on 2024 and look ahead, it’s evident that crypto is accelerating at the intersection of technological innovation and deeply rooted human behaviors. Speculative fervor, the pursuit of financial autonomy, and the need to belong remain powerful forces shaping the market. Yet, alongside these timeless dynamics, we see clear progress: foundational infrastructure is scaling to meet demand, AI is unlocking new possibilities for automation and intelligence, and regulatory clarity is gradually bridging crypto into traditional systems.
The most exciting opportunities lie where these forces converge – where cutting-edge technology solves real-world problems while aligning with (or creating) user motivations. Whether its AI agents autonomously managing capital, decentralized networks disrupting centralized control, or consumer apps reimagining how people interact with money, the next phase of crypto will be defined by its ability to deliver both utility and entertainment. We remain optimistic about the road ahead and committed to supporting the builders defining this movement.
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