If you think crypto has become "boring," it means you've seen the endgame
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If you think crypto has become "boring," it means you've seen the endgame
Everything that crypto enthusiasts envisioned a decade ago is slowly becoming "boring" enough to be practical, and this is happening at a critical moment.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Christian Catalini
Compiled by: TechFlow
Photo: Alex Blania and Sam Altman at the "World Unwrapped" event in San Francisco on December 11, 2025
Christian Catalini
If you've been following the cryptocurrency space, you may have noticed that recently everything seems to be accelerating. Normally this means "the numbers are going up," but this time the driving force isn't a bull market or some breakthrough in crypto technology—it's because the rules are finally starting to be clearly defined.
As stablecoin regulation gradually takes shape, the industry's "handbrake" has finally been released. Projects are accelerating their shift from serving only crypto insiders to building products for mainstream markets. After all, when you're no longer constantly worried about breaking laws, you can boldly focus on building real business models.
It turns out that when foundational components fall into place—when stablecoins are no longer an existential threat but a regulated business—the very definition of "ambition" changes.
You stop trying to reinvent the concept of money and start focusing on building genuinely useful products. The so-called "last-mile" barriers that previously limited blockchain adoption are gradually disappearing, largely because decentralized networks are finally doing what is obvious—and even somewhat boring: acknowledging that one of blockchain’s most valuable functions right now—at least at this stage—is connecting to Visa cards.
The Anonymity Gap
Payments have always been the foundational layer that cryptocurrency must break through first. Payments are the basic primitive upon which everything else depends. Satoshi Nakamoto had almost all the necessary elements for an electronic cash system: a digital asset, a global ledger, and incentive mechanisms to sustain it. However, identity verification is essential for securely scaling payments. Modern money is not just a measure of value—it is also a carrier of intent that needs to be verified.
Bitcoin elegantly solved the double-spending problem, ensuring digital cash cannot be copied and pasted, but it did not solve the issue of identity authentication. While some view anonymity as a feature, for widespread global adoption, it is actually a major vulnerability. I learned this deeply during the design of Libra. Our first compromise was abandoning non-custodial wallets: despite designing clever ways to secure them, regulators demanded from day one that we establish a secure and controlled perimeter. Society strongly insists that financial systems must not support illicit financial activities, and if your permissionless protocol inadvertently funds terrorism, society will ultimately revoke your permission.
The Stablecoin Sandwich
The current state of cryptocurrency is a textbook case of "infrastructure inversion." In theory, we’ll eventually have advanced zero-knowledge proofs and onchain attestations that perfectly balance privacy with compliance. But in reality, we’re currently just bolting new technologies onto old ones in the most unexciting ways.
Take the "stablecoin sandwich," an industry term referring to converting fiat into stablecoins, transmitting via blockchain networks, and then converting back into fiat at the other end—effectively linking two otherwise separate real-time domestic payment systems. This works, but its scalability is ironically limited. It does not rely on the openness of crypto networks. Enterprises don’t directly connect to permissionless networks because that requires extra work. Instead, they typically hire coordination service providers who handle compliance checks and interact with blockchains on their behalf.
This reality is far from the vision of taking control of one’s own destiny; instead, it brings intermediaries back to center stage. It turns out that while blockchain solves the settlement problem—transferring value—it fails to address the information problem. In traditional finance, every payment comes with associated data: who initiated it, why it was sent, and whether the sender is on a sanctions list. Without transmitting this information, even instant settlement becomes meaningless, because the recipient’s bank, bound by legal requirements, will still reject the transaction.
Human Money?
So what might the future look like? Yesterday’s “Yesterday’s World” event (formerly Worldcoin) in San Francisco offered a potential answer—and it involves a chrome orb. On stage, Alex Blania and Sam Altman reminisced about times when the idea of AI consuming the internet wasn’t yet obvious. Yet one thing was clear to them: the ability to distinguish a human from a robot would become the world’s most valuable resource. This pursuit of “Proof of Personhood” led Blania to build a custom hardware network designed to verify users as biological entities.
After six years of development, what once seemed like a clumsy futuristic experiment—"scanning everyone’s iris"—is shedding its gimmicky image and beginning to show real utility. Sam Altman quoted Paul Buchheit to capture the key insight: “The future might require two currencies: machine money and human money.” It turns out that Proof of Personhood is the compliance feature of the AI era. To scale payments, you need this technology to distinguish good actors from bad; in a world flooded with infinite synthetic content, you need it to prove the only scarce thing: that something was genuinely created by a human.
For years, the dream of cryptocurrency has been to build a global version of Venmo using cryptography. At yesterday’s “World” (formerly Worldcoin) event, they demonstrated a wallet that essentially achieves this goal. Though the infrastructure it relies on closely resembles traditional fintech architecture—integrating virtual bank accounts across 18 countries, a Visa card, and local payment networks—they successfully bridged the gap between crypto and reality. It turns out users’ real demand for global money movement isn’t a new token, but a simple solution where they can deposit salaries and use a Visa card. And the way to drive adoption? Classic tech growth: World offers most services free of charge.
Partly because banks need fees to extract rents while World doesn’t. But more importantly, the core idea is that moving money should be low-cost. For banks, a wire transfer may involve three correspondent banks and a diplomatic mission involving fax machines; for blockchain, it’s simply updating a ledger entry. World is betting that the actual cost of moving money will approach zero.
App Store Arbitrage
Innovation extends beyond payments. Back in 2024, I predicted that "Mini Apps" could become crypto’s killer app. At the time, I said they might first appear “clumsy, niche, even toy-like.” That may sound trivial or even annoying, but their impact on market structure is profound. Mini Apps aren’t just about embedding a calculator into your X feed—they allow developers to distribute software without needing approval from app stores or paying 30% commissions. It turns out escaping the “walled garden” is just another way of saying developers want to keep their revenue. The most valuable thing a new ecosystem can offer developers is freedom from landlord-like rent extraction during payments.
The combination of mini apps with strong identity verification opens up entirely new primitives for developers—and signals a strategic pivot for World. Previously, World’s approach was more rigid: “scan your iris or leave,” which was clearly too dogmatic. Now, World adopts a tiered service model, treating verified “human identity” as a premium feature. This market mechanism makes more sense. Users may hesitate to scan biometrics for some abstract future benefit, but they’ll willingly participate if it means higher yields or more engaging experiences. For example, the team showed how Tinder users in Japan use World ID for verification. It turns out the killer app for sovereign identity might simply be proving to a date that you’re not a bot. If you doubt people will trade biometrics for convenience, ask those willing to scan their eyes to skip lines at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).
Beyond the Ledger
Blania clearly understands the platform paradox: you want top online marketplaces, social networks, chatbots, and financial services to adopt World ID as a foundational layer, but they won’t do so until you have enough users. And without products, you can’t attract users. So you must build products yourself to draw users in.
This explains World’s push into payments and its expansion into messaging. World is collaborating with Shane Mac’s team to directly integrate the decentralized messaging protocol XMTP into its app. Compared to centralized alternatives like Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram, this offers significant privacy advantages. It turns out that if you want to become the invisible identity layer of the internet, you might first need to prove your worth by building better messaging products.
Before the event, Shane Mac showed me his latest experiment—Convos. Built on XMTP, this app demonstrates that crypto interoperability can extend beyond financial services to everyday communication tools. Convos uses cryptography to enable usage without registration, phone numbers, history tracking, or surveillance—and of course, no reliance on centralized servers.
The selling point here is that this might be the first truly "traceless" messaging app. In a world where every Slack message and email is permanently stored, conversations that truly disappear have become the ultimate luxury. The earliest adopters might be investigative journalists, but the broader vision is to re-establish private conversation as the default mode of human interaction—not a suspicious exception.
Overall, while these experiments are still in early stages, the trajectory is becoming clear. Cryptographic infrastructure is finally catching up with its original promises. Everything imagined by crypto enthusiasts a decade ago is slowly becoming “boring” enough to be practical—and it’s happening at a critical moment. As AI accelerates, the ability to cryptographically verify truth is no longer just a philosophical hobby of cypherpunks, but an essential infrastructure for the entire digital economy.
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