Author: Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital
Compiled by: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher
When most people look at on-chain technology, they see a faster, more efficient version of existing technology: faster payments, lower settlement costs, more efficient capital markets. They are not wrong. This alone contains enormous opportunities and will spawn numerous venture-scale outcomes over the next decade.
But I believe this is the smaller part of the story.
When I look at this technology, at the possibilities enabled by programmable assets in a global, composable, always-on environment, I think we have only explored the tip of the iceberg. The most amazing things have not yet been built. And the reason they haven't been built is not that the technology isn't ready, but that we haven't yet conceived of them.
The Email Trap
In the early days of the internet, the most obvious use case was communication. Email was faster and cheaper than letters. Email was a big deal, but it wasn't about making the post office run faster. It was its own thing and spread quickly. So if you were assessing the internet in 1995, seeing the widespread adoption of email, you could reasonably conclude that the thesis had been proven.
But most of the opportunity hadn't even germinated yet. Search, social networks, e-commerce, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), streaming – none of these were 'faster versions of existing things.' They were entirely new categories, impossible to conceive of before the internet created the conditions for them. Google was not a faster library, Facebook was not a faster phone book, AWS was not a faster server room. They only made sense in the context of a globally connected, programmable network.
Collectively, these new categories are orders of magnitude larger than the 'faster communication' use case.
I believe crypto is now in its booming era. Most of the focus is on making existing financial products run better on-chain – things like faster settlement, cheaper cross-border payments, tokenized treasuries and stocks, and more efficient lending markets. And it's working: by 2025, stablecoin settlement will reach $33 trillion, and the market cap of tokenized treasuries recently surpassed $150 billion. The world's largest asset managers and banks are building on public chains.
This is great. I'm excited about all of it. I'm working on it every day. But this is the most obvious application – it fits perfectly into our existing mental models, and its scale is large enough to trick us into thinking this is the entirety of the opportunity.
The question I'm more interested in is: what becomes possible only when you have programmable resources in a global, composable, always-on, permissionless environment? What are the new verbs, the not-yet-named categories?
What New Verbs Look Like
We have at least one clear example, worth examining closely because it illustrates what I think we'll see frequently.
What would you say about a system where you can borrow a billion dollars with no collateral, and the lender has mathematical certainty of repayment?
That's a flash loan: borrow any amount of money with zero collateral, provided you repay it in the same transaction. If you fail to repay, the entire transaction is automatically reversed as if it never happened. The lender has zero risk. No credit check. No relationship required. No collateral. It works solely on the logic of the system providing the guarantee.
Before flash loans existed, nobody needed them. Why? The concept was completely alien to traditional financial systems. It would have been useless even before programmable assets existed, so there was no existing category to improve upon. Uncollareralized, infinite-size, guaranteed-repayment loans are impossible in any system where trades take time. They only become possible when execution is atomic, assets are programmable, and the entire sequence of operations either completes entirely or not at all.
Once atomicity made it feasible, flash loans became a standard tool in the on-chain economy for arbitrage, liquidations, collateral swaps, and capital-efficiency strategies that are impossible in traditional payment systems. Of course, any powerful new technology will inevitably be used for malicious purposes, which only underscores the novelty of its underlying mechanism.
Flash loans didn't make lending faster or cheaper. They created a way to lend that was structurally impossible before programmable assets and atomic execution. This is what I mean by 'new verbs' or 'new actions.' The system can now do things it couldn't do before, not because someone found an optimization, but because the fundamentals changed.
The Limits of Imagination
But I have to be honest about the limits of my own imagination.
I can describe the design space in abstract terms. Public blockchains introduce a set of primitives that didn't exist before: atomic execution, shared global state, programmable custody, deterministic settlement, composability across independent actors, and software assets. We've never had a financial system where settlement, custody, clearing, and execution are all bundled into the same programmable environment. When previously separate layers merge into one, new things become possible.
But I can't tell you what those things are. And I think that's precisely the point.
Human imagination works backward. We are very good at improving on things that already exist, but we're not very good at conceiving of things that were impossible yesterday. We look at on-chain technology and instinctively ask: which existing products can it make faster and cheaper? The harder and more valuable question is: what can it create that didn't exist before?
I have some hunches. Programmable custody systems that enforce complex agreements without intermediaries. Capital that can be delegated to software agents operating within bounded parameters. Financial structures that can be assembled and dissolved in real time based on conditions verified on-chain. These directions feel right. But the most important applications might be ones I can't describe yet because they look nothing like anything I've seen before.
My inability to list them is precisely the strongest argument for this thesis: if I could easily list all the new things, they wouldn't be genuinely new. The design space is vast, mostly unexplored, and impossible to sketch with intuition alone. That's the point.
So most attempts in this space will fail. A broad design space doesn't mean outcomes are easy. But the opportunity in the ones that work is enormous, and we've been building pattern recognition for thirteen years to identify them before they become obvious. It's this opportunity that makes me excited about the next decade.
Most of the opportunity is still ahead.
If the internet analogy holds, the on-chain equivalents of search, social, cloud computing, and SaaS haven't been built yet. Email was a trillion-dollar industry, and everything that came after was orders of magnitude more valuable.
I think when we look back ten years from now, the things that will excite us most are the things that don't exist today. It won't just be about making banks, exchanges, or asset managers more efficient. It will be about things that are only possible when you have programmable assets in a composable, global, 24/7 environment. Things that seem obvious in hindsight, but we can't see today because they have no precedent.
Flash loans give us a glimpse, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. The design space is vast, and we're only just beginning to explore.
