Variant Fund Partner's tweet: For crypto to meet market demands, it must first move toward commercialization.
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Variant Fund Partner's tweet: For crypto to meet market demands, it must first move toward commercialization.
The commercialization of cryptocurrency may mean that real opportunities are just beginning.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Jesse Walden
Translation: TechFlow
The first decade of smart contract blockchains originated in Bitcoin’s original cypherpunk values: censorship resistance, open source, permissionless innovation, and a new vision of building a democratic and fair internet on a shared world computer. Today, these ideological values are under market pressure, as mainstream markets prioritize different factors: performance, cost, profitability, and compliance.
Powerful technologies are often not used according to their creators’ or early adopters’ original intentions. Consider Bitcoin as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” versus Bitcoin ETFs or USDC.
As the foundational values of smart contract blockchains merge with mainstream market values, the next decade may take a different path.
The growing range of applications on smart contract platforms—fiat-backed stablecoins and real-world assets (RWAs), open finance, and many decentralized networks—are neither decentralized, permissionless, nor censorship-resistant. Instead, they leverage the underlying blockchain’s decentralization for openness, interoperability, and settlement.
Applications are also increasingly abstracting away L1 cryptocurrencies, which have historically been viewed as censorship-resistant “internet money.” This shift is prompting many to reevaluate the value proposition of major cryptocurrencies—including the base assets of next-generation chains.
For early adopters, this may be difficult to accept. This isn’t why many of us entered the space. Does this mean it’s all over?
I don’t think so. But it may mark the beginning of a new phase.
In aligning with market values, crypto is becoming commercialized. Commercialization, especially of open and permissionless software, is how great ideas reach the widest possible audience—and thereby exert greater influence on the world.
Commercialization usually involves compromise. The key is shaping the nature of those compromises to influence the outcome. To do that, you must let go of ideological dogma, adapt to the rules of the field, compete, and actively steer things toward your desired direction.
For example, compromising on decentralization for scale—whether through rollups or integrated architectures—can better serve today’s use cases that bring wallets to people. If that works, the next opportunity is to enhance decentralization—and then educate more people about new concepts, bringing them back in line with the original ideology.
This is deeply personal for me. I care deeply about the original ideology; it’s what drew me here in the first place. That said, I care even more about impact. I learned this lesson in another creative community. I went to college in Montreal, a place with a vibrant cultural scene at the time (Arcade Fire, Tiga, A-Trak, Chromeo, Grimes, Vice, American Apparel, etc.). The culture emerging from there quickly spread globally via the internet, merging with other scenes—especially music blogs between 2004 and 2012 (Hype Machine, anyone remember that?).
Soon, this cultural movement entered the mainstream. It evolved largely as certain pop artists and brands distilled its sound and essence, stripping away nuance and repackaging it in accessible but shallow ways. At the same time, a small group of pioneering artists and creatives from the original scene held on, becoming icons within popular culture. To achieve this, they often had to make measured compromises between the ideals of the original movement and what the broader public could embrace. This blend of conviction and pragmatism was admirable because it enabled the widest possible impact—thus advancing culture at the largest scale.
So if you feel the values that brought you into crypto are being diluted by the mainstream—yes, I understand. But try reframing the situation—because from an impact perspective, the commercialization of crypto might mean the real opportunity is only just beginning.
I’ll try to illustrate what this opportunity might look like with more concrete examples. I touched yesterday on “crypto-native only” vs “better with crypto,” but there’s more to say.
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