From the Brief History of the Internet, Looking at the Next Decade of Crypto
From the history of the internet, this article draws parallels to project the next decade of Crypto. A key threshold is identified: 1 billion monthly active users, which signifies a transition from a tool to a civilization-altering infrastructure, as seen with platforms like Facebook and Amazon.
Currently, Crypto is likened to the internet circa 2002, with user growth from 5 million in 2017 to over 500 million by 2026. Presently, the few applications with over 100 million users are predominantly exchanges and stablecoins (e.g., Binance, Tether), leading to skepticism about its broader utility beyond finance.
Despite this, investors like Marc Andreessen remain highly optimistic, drawing a parallel to his early belief in the web. A major catalyst for adoption is improved user experience. For the internet, it was the graphical web browser; for Crypto, it was the 2017-2018 infrastructure boom with the rise of efficient exchanges (Binance), stablecoins (USDT), and smart contracts (Ethereum) that created a functional global financial system.
The article posits that the next major accelerator for Crypto could be AI Agents. For autonomous AI to operate independently, they will require a permissionless, 24/7 global settlement layer—a role Crypto is uniquely positioned to fill, potentially creating billions of non-human economic agents.
Two primary paths to 1 billion users are identified: solving cross-border payments for the over 1 billion people engaging in global interactions, and the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) to democratize global investment.
The conclusion is that the first Crypto application to reach 1 billion users will mark its transition to true global infrastructure, much like Facebook did for the internet in 2012. This milestone is predicted to occur around 2036, but only if Crypto solves problems at a sufficiently massive scale. History of technology shows that transformative innovations are often misunderstood at their inception, and Crypto is likely following the same path.
marsbit03/16 13:07
