I was five when we got a computer at home.
Teachers used to pull me out of class when theirs stopped working. By 10 or 11 I was building awful little HTML sites, spending stupid amounts of time on AOL and MSN Messenger and watching adults slowly work out why any of this mattered.
So yeah, I understand why everybody compares crypto to the early internet.
I just think we keep comparing the wrong bit.
Crypto has already done the spectacular crashes. More than once. I’m not sure it has done the part where being a “crypto company” stops getting you the meeting.
That point feels close now, if we’re not already there.
The money disappeared before the internet did
The dot-com crash didn’t make people stop using the internet. It made investors a lot less willing to fund a website and a story.
Pew’s long-term data puts US home broadband at roughly 3% in 2000. By 2007 it was 47%.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. The market’s internet story got destroyed while the actual internet kept working its way into normal life.
Netflix started in 1997 and got rid of video-store due dates and late fees. Priceline launched the same year and let people name a price for travel. Salesforce started in 1999 and moved CRM software out of the server room and into a browser.
All three were completely internet-native.
Customers still had a very normal reason to pay them.
Nobody went home excited that their CRM was “built on internet infrastructure.” They cared that they no longer had to buy and maintain the servers.
We still sell the plumbing
I’ve been in crypto for more than seven years and I still see teams start with a chain, token or whatever word is getting meetings this quarter, then go hunting for a problem.
Another platform for people who already live onchain. Faster. Cheaper. More decentralised. Usually asking the same users and liquidity to move over one more time.
Then the latest investor reports come out and suddenly everybody has an AI-agent or RWA slide.
I get it. Those are the meetings capital wants right now.
But swapping “L2” for “AI x crypto” doesn’t mean the industry grew up. Sometimes it just means people learned which words get the meeting.
The order still matters.
Somebody already has a problem. They are already wasting time, losing money or putting up with a piece of financial infrastructure that barely works. Find that person first.
Then work out whether crypto makes their life meaningfully better.
Maybe it gets a freelancer paid across borders without waiting days. Maybe it lets a business settle money between systems that don’t trust one another. Maybe an AI agent needs a way to pay for something without a human opening five accounts first.
If the user has to care about the chain before they can care about the result, we probably haven’t hidden enough of the plumbing yet.
My money is on the next enormous crypto product having millions of users who couldn’t tell you what chain it runs on.
They’ll be able to tell you exactly why they use it.