Author:Chris Dixon
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
It is currently fashionable to declare that "the non-financial use cases of cryptocurrency are dead." Some also claim that the "read, write, own" model has failed. These conclusions misunderstand both the thesis and the stage we are in.
We are clearly in the financial era of blockchain. But the core idea was never that all crypto applications would emerge simultaneously, nor that finance wouldn't be the first to appear. The core idea has always been, and still is, that blockchains introduce a new primitive: the ability to coordinate people and capital at internet scale, with ownership baked directly into the system. (And increasingly, to coordinate AI agents.)
Finance is the most natural domain for this primitive to prove itself, which is why we often cite financial uses first when listing productive uses for tokens. Finance is not separate from the grander thesis; it is part of it. It is the foundation and testing ground for everything else.
This belief has guided our work at a16z crypto from the beginning. Many of our investments have been explicitly in finance: Coinbase, Maker, Compound, Uniswap, and Morpho, among others. As I wrote in my book: "Blockchain networks can turn financial infrastructure into a public good, evolving the internet from mere information transfer to value transfer." We expected finance to play a major role early on and continue to expect other categories to follow in due time.
At a16z and a16z crypto, we play the long game: our fund structures are designed for 10+ year horizons because building new industries takes time.
Order of Operations Matters
So why haven't non-financial use cases taken off yet?
First, the order of operations matters. Infrastructure and distribution often precede the emergence of new application categories. The internet didn't start with social media, streaming, or online communities; it started with packet switching, TCP/IP, and basic connectivity. It was only after hundreds of millions of people were online that entirely new cultural and economic categories emerged.
Cryptocurrency is likely no exception. We probably need to first get hundreds of millions of people "on-chain" through financial applications like payments, stablecoins, savings, and DeFi, before we see meaningful adoption in media, gaming, AI, or other more distant fields. Many applications rely on wallets, identity, liquidity, and trust already being in place.
There are other factors. A core advantage of cryptocurrency is the ability to grant community ownership through tokens. But years of scams, extractive behavior, and regulatory crackdowns have severely eroded trust in tokens. This might also be contributing to the recent market downturn. It's hard to build a genuine owner community in a cynical environment.
Policy is the Missing Piece
This is why we have spent over 5 years advocating for clear regulatory frameworks around tokens. Good policy does two things simultaneously: it provides a clear roadmap for builders, and it establishes risk-based guardrails to protect consumers and build market trust. Market structure legislation like the CLARITY Act would introduce disclosure and transparency standards to guard against rug pulls and proprietary trading—standards that are routine in other markets but have long been missing in crypto.
Progress on policy for emerging technologies is often slow and incremental... until it isn't. Much of our work over the years (including my book) has focused on contributing to this foundation: explaining the benefits of crypto and blockchain to policymakers and a broader audience, and providing a grounded way to think about the technology's evolution over time. We often hear that this framing has been useful for decision-makers in Washington D.C. Years of education, debate, and refinement can build quietly in the background, then surface instantly when a political or institutional window opens.
The reaction to the stablecoin legislation (likely referring to a specific act, translated here as "GENIUS" based on context, though the original Chinese text uses a non-standard term) strongly validated this theory. Almost overnight, stablecoins went from suspect to legitimate in the eyes of finance, tech, and government. The shift seemed sudden, but it was the result of years of effort by builders, policymakers, and advocates converging at the right moment. I anticipated a positive reaction, but the speed and scale of the technology's adoption even surprised me. This makes me optimistic about market structure legislation, which, at a macro level, will do for other categories of tokens what the stablecoin legislation did for stablecoins.
What the Long Game Looks Like
Big things take time. The AI breakthroughs we see today are thanks to decades of hard work by brilliant people. (The first paper on neural networks was published in 1943.) The internet dates back to the 1960s, and the commercial internet was made possible by visionary builders and thoughtful policy actions in the 1990s. Building new technological systems is a long game, and this is what the long game looks like in practice: long periods of foundational work, followed by sharp inflection points.
If you want to work in a more mature industry, that's fine. If you want to build a new industry from the ground up, it can be messy and frustrating, but it's important work.
It is the messy years that make the later glory seem inevitable.
