Author: Chris Dixon; Compiler: PANews

It is now fashionable to declare that "non-financial use cases for cryptocurrencies are dead." Others claim that "read write own" has failed. These conclusions misunderstand both our core argument and our stage.

We are clearly in the financial age of blockchain. But the core point was never that all crypto applications would emerge at the same time, or that finance wouldn’t come first. The core idea was and still is: Blockchain introduces a new primitive—the ability to coordinate people and capital at the scale of the Internet and embed ownership directly into the system. (And increasingly includes coordinating AI agents.)

Finance is the most natural and easiest domain for such primitives to prove their value, so we often first bring it up as an example of a token's productive use. Finance is not separate from the broader argument; it is part of it, the foundation and proving ground for everything else.

This belief has guided our work at a16z crypto from the beginning. Many of our investments are explicitly financial-oriented: Coinbase, Maker, Compound, Uniswap, Morpho, etc. As I write in my book: “Blockchain networks can turn financial infrastructure into a public good, upgrading the Internet from just processing bits to also processing money.” We expected finance to become important early on, and we have always expected other categories to follow suit.

We play a long-term game at a16z and a16z crypto: our fund structure is designed for a cycle of more than 10 years, because it takes time to build a new industry.

The order of execution is important

So why haven’t non-financial use cases taken off yet?

First of all, the order of execution is important. Infrastructure and distribution channels often precede the emergence of entirely 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. Only when hundreds of millions of people came online did entirely new cultural and economic categories truly emerge.

The same may well be true for cryptocurrencies. It is very likely that we will need to get hundreds of millions of people on-chain through financial applications (payments, stablecoins, savings, DeFi, etc.) before we see meaningful adoption in media, games, AI, or other further fields. Many applications rely on the foundations of wallets, identity, liquidity, and trust already in place.

There are other factors. One of the core advantages of cryptocurrencies is giving community ownership through tokens. But years of scams, extractive practices and regulatory crackdowns have seriously eroded people’s trust in tokens. This likely also contributed to the recent market downturn. In an environment steeped in cynicism, it’s difficult to build a true “ownership community.”

Policy is the missing link

That’s why we’ve been pushing for a clear regulatory framework around tokens for more than 5 years. Good policy can do two things at once: provide builders with a clear roadmap while establishing risk-based guardrails that protect consumers and rebuild trust in the market. Market structure legislation like the CLARITY Act would introduce disclosure and transparency standards to guard against rug pulls and self-dealing—standards that are routine practice in other markets but have long been missing in the crypto space.

For emerging technologies, policy progress is often slow and incremental... until suddenly it isn't. Much of our work over the years (including my book) has contributed to this foundation: explaining the benefits of crypto and blockchain to policymakers and wider audiences, and providing a down-to-earth way of thinking about how the technology evolves over time. We often hear that this kind of framework is helpful to policymakers in Washington. Years of education, debate, and refinement can build up quietly in the background, then explode when a political or institutional window opens.

The reaction to the GENIUS bill strongly validates this theory. Almost overnight, stablecoins went from “suspicious” to legitimate technology in the eyes of finance, technology, and governments. This shift may seem sudden, but it’s actually the result of years of work by builders, policymakers, and advocates coming together at the right time. I expected a positive reaction, but I was still surprised by the speed and scale of the technology and adoption. This makes me optimistic about market structure legislation – from a high-level perspective, it could do for other classes of tokens what GENIUS did for stablecoins.

What does the long-term game look like

Big things take time. The breakthroughs we see in AI today are the result of decades of hard work by countless brilliant people. (The first paper on neural networks was published in 1943.) The Internet dates back to the 1960s, and the realization of the commercial Internet was inseparable from visionary builders and thoughtful policy actions in the 1990s. Building a new technology system is a long-term game, and the actual situation is like this: a long period of laying the groundwork, followed by a sharp turning point moment.

If you want to work in a more established industry, that's no problem. If you're trying to build an entirely new industry from scratch, the process can be confusing and frustrating, but it's important work.

The years of chaos led to the glorious years in the future.