Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
Crypto began as both a belief system and a builder movement, rooted in the desire to counterbalance centralized money and gatekept protocols. It was a small group of cypherpunks and developers trying to prove that money could become software, and that rules could be enforced by code instead of institutions.
A decade has since passed, and today this is still very much alive and well, but rather than toppling the existing regime, it’s provided a way for us to upgrade it and give people more choice, freedom, and access. A path to go bankless!
From an idealist experiment into something the world is increasingly forced to take seriously: a globally recognized upgrade path for the financial system. Not because everyone suddenly became a decentralization maxi, but because the utility is obvious. Dollars can move 24/7. Settlement can be global and instant. Markets can be composable. Assets can be programmable. And financial infrastructure can be embedded directly into software.
This evolution changes the participant base, and when the participant base changes, the business landscape changes with it. The “easy” era of winning through novelty, hype, or incentives is fading. The next era is about durable flows, distribution, trust, and execution.
The Crypto-Native Era
In the first decade, the dominant participants were mostly crypto-native, and their behavior shaped the market:
- Builders and idealists built the rails and primitives.
- Traders turned tokens into liquid markets and made distribution king.
- DeFi power users proved onchain finance could work, even if incentives distorted reality.
- Meme-driven retail turned crypto into a cultural phenomenon, accelerating onboarding through social gravity.
The common thread was that the market was largely driven by speculation and narratives. There was real innovation inside that churn, but product market fit and longevity weren’t there for 99.9% of projects. Over time, the experimentation clarified what actually makes sense onchain, what consumers will reliably use, and what can support sustainable businesses.
The hard truth is that for many early participants, “decentralized” and “always-on” weren’t compelling features if they came with higher costs or worse UX. The market voted with its dollars, and most onchain gaming, social, and art experiments never crossed the gap from novelty to habit. (Perhaps they will in the future, but it’s likely to take a lot longer than we had all hoped in the early days.)
Where crypto did find durable PMF was finance and payments: moving value, settling trades, issuing assets, lending and borrowing, earning yield, hedging risk. When the core job-to-be-done is money, the onchain model stops being a philosophical preference and starts being a practical advantage.
The Infrastructure Era
From 2026 onward, crypto will look less like a belief system and more like the infrastructure layer for global finance.
The center of gravity is shifting from retail experimentation to operators and institutions, with stablecoins becoming default settlement rails for fintechs, cross-border payments, and treasury ops. Meanwhile, RWAs and tokenized cash/credit are bridging traditional assets into onchain distribution; and compliance, custody, reporting, and risk controls are moving from edge cases to core product requirements. Wallets will keep evolving into “accounts,” with keys, identity, and permissions increasingly abstracted away for most users.
This is the upgrade thesis in practice: crypto stops competing on ideology and starts competing on outcomes. Lower cost, faster settlement, global reach, always-on markets, and programmable workflows become the reasons it wins. As the stack matures, decentralization becomes table stakes, performance improves, costs trend toward zero, and the market gets ruthless about margin and differentiation.
The net effect? The easy game ends. Novelty and fake/temporary incentives matter less; distribution, trust, and execution matter more. Less “crypto launch,” more “payments and financial warfare,” with consolidation and enterprise GTM becoming the default path to scale. (We’re already seeing a big uptick in mergers and acquisitions this year and exchanges consuming definitive products)
Crypto's Next Cohort
If the last era was “institutions discovering crypto,” the next era is “institutions and fintechs using crypto rails without calling it crypto.”
The dominant participant becomes the operator: treasury teams, payment ops, fintech PMs, risk teams, and wealth platforms. People who don’t want to “ape.” They want to route money safely, cheaply, and predictably.
And then you get the next unlock: software begins to transact. Automated treasury. Automated purchasing. Automated rebalancing. Agents operating within constraints. That doesn’t mean humans disappear. It means a meaningful amount of economic activity becomes programmatic, and the rails that support that become extremely valuable.
The consequence is that the crypto stack becomes less like an “app ecosystem” and more like a financial OS that software plugs into, and novel frontends service unique client needs.
Building for the New Era
If you’re building today, your biggest risk is not technical. It’s misidentifying your customer.
If you build for the 2021 participant, you will optimize for: virality, incentives, short-term liquidity, hype cycles.
If you build for the 2026 participant, you will optimize for: distribution, integrations, reliability, reporting, aligned and sustainable incentives, clear token value accrual, and risk packaging.
Both worlds may coexist, but the growth center is shifting. The market is moving from “crypto as a speculative asset playground” toward “crypto as financial infrastructure.” That doesn’t mean memes disappear. It means the biggest flows increasingly come from real settlement, real assets, real balance sheets, and real distribution.
The industry is becoming more serious because it’s becoming more useful. And usefulness attracts competition.
The Real Game Begins
Crypto didn’t betray its roots. It proved them.
The cypherpunks were right that money could become software. The builders were right that markets could become composable. The traders, degens, and culture waves were messy (and incredibly fun), but they built the distribution and liquidity that hardened the rails.
Now, crypto is a globally recognized upgrade path for the financial system. Settlement that runs continuously. Assets that can be issued and distributed like software. Compliance that becomes programmable. Finance that plugs into apps.
The next era won’t be won by whoever ships the flashiest token. It will be won by whoever owns the flows: the distribution, the trust, the rails, and the interfaces where normal businesses and normal people interact with programmable money.
Competition is going to be fierce because the prize is going to be absolutely enormous, and 2026 is when things get exciting.
