For years, I have had high hopes for the blockchain.

Not as an investment, but as an un-hackable means of tracking ideas and digital assets. I still believe in it's value, use and necessity, especially in the age of AI.

As such, I've put up with a lot of hype cycles. First shit coins, then kitties, apes and punks, and now memes. For all the hype about financial freedom and technological innovation, crypto's biggest challenge isn't regulatory hurdles or technical limitations—it's relevance. Listen up crypto, the main stream is laughing at you, rolling their eyes at meme coins and rug pulls.

To truly transform from niche interest to mainstream utility, the blockchain ecosystem must evolve beyond its self-referential culture and demonstrate real value for the everyday people who use the internet.

The Crypto Echo Chamber

Scroll through any blockchain-focused social platforms, like NOSTR in the Bitcoin space, or Farcaster in the Ethereum layer 2 crowd, and you'll find conversations dominated by price predictions, and pleads of "ship!" to the developer-focused crowd. The Solana guys on X love their technical debates about transaction speeds. (For some reason they also like purple websites?) Every chain's community still falls for the classic hype cycle of NFT drops.

If you are a normal person, all of this makes zero sense to you. That's exactly the point.

While finance professionals naturally obsess over markets as part of their profession, most people don't wish to dedicate their lives to tracking price charts or analyzing tokenomics. Even the terminology—"decentralized finance" or "digital assets"—frames blockchain primarily as a tool for traders rather than for teachers, healthcare workers, or artists. You know... the rest of us.

I'm not an investor. Sure, I like financial reward because I live in an economically driven world. But my interests are far beyond speculative assets. I'm a creative, a builder, and a dad. I like baseball, game engines and computers, and games with robots. I spend most of my life thinking about things that are not crypto. And, that's just it. 99% of people on the internet spend their lives thinking about things that are not crypto.

Crypto products target those already invested in the ecosystem. Crypto content targets people who will buy the token or the collectible. They create a feedback loop that reinforces the bubble. Social platforms filled with "laser-eyed" Bitcoin maximalists and Ethereum NFT avatars discussing floor prices, leave no space for someone who simply wants to share poetry, discuss philosophy, or connect with friends. The result: crypto remains caught in cycles of boom and bust, its fortunes tied to the enthusiasm of a relatively small, hyper-engaged community who wants their chosen chain's value to keep going up.

What Actually Matters

For crypto to actually matter in the real world, it needs to attract people who've never heard of Satoshi Nakamoto and couldn't care less what a "ZK rollup" is. The person I wish to onboard shouldn't need a 45-minute explanation just to use a friggin' app.

Imagine platforms where a teacher could share original lesson plans and get paid directly, or where your grandma's secret banana bread recipe gets proper credit when it goes viral instead of being stolen by some random food blog.

But using anything crypto-related is currently a nightmare.

Setting up a wallet feels like defusing a bomb: "Write down this random phrase of 12 words, never store it digitally, don't lose it, don't let anyone see it!" Meanwhile, you can set up TikTok in 30 seconds and be addicted to an algorithm in five minutes. For crypto to go mainstream, using blockchain apps needs to be as easy as posting to instagram.

Make it Not Suck

Right now, crypto is dominated by tech bros who are really into finance and libertarian politics. It leads to similar projects aimed at similar people. Crypto needs regular people. Everyday voices building for different interests – artists creating new ways to share their work, gamers developing items that truly belong to players, writers exploring new publishing models. Maybe it's just regular families sharing pictures of their kids with friends?

Crypto won't matter until it stops being about crypto.

No one cares about blockchain – they care about what it lets them do. Instagram users don't talk about how much they love "centralized photo storage technology" – they just share pictures of their stupid lunch plate. The future isn't in convincing everyone to become crypto enthusiasts; it's in building apps so good that people use them without even realizing blockchain is involved.

Until the average mommy blogger builds an audience and monetizes it on Nostr, and the Harry Potter fan boy starts making Hermoine gifs that go viral on Solana, we're going to be stuck with more of the same.

Because of what's happening with AI, we really need the blockchain. I mean it. Things are getting really bad, and if this technology is actually going to live up to the promise of decentralization, we need to start using it beyond what it is now.

So, please, can we just make it not suck?

Thanks for reading. See you next time.

Nye Warburton is a creative technologist and educator who still believes in decentralized networks. This essay was written though improvisational takes using Otter.ai, and then edited and pieced together with Claude Sonnet 3.7. Images were prompted and customized with Stable Diffusion. For more information visit https://nyewarburton.com