Bid Farewell to the “Casino” Mindset: The Next Wave of Crypto Applications Should Target Mass Adoption

By Paul Veradittakit

Translated by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

2026 will be a pivotal year. We will witness the full transformation of “crypto as an industry” into “crypto as a service.”

For the past decade, the crypto world has been awash with hype. The approval of Bitcoin ETFs in 2024 granted mainstream financial recognition. In 2025, players focused on building foundational infrastructure. By 2026, real value will accrue to companies that leverage blockchain to solve persistent, deep-rooted problems in traditional industries—while making the blockchain itself entirely invisible to users.

The next generation of crypto unicorns won’t be built on hype. They’ll be companies that use blockchain to boost product efficiency by an order of magnitude—unlocking trillion-dollar markets—while completely abstracting away the underlying complexity.

Crypto Has Won the “Weekend”

When the Iran conflict erupted, U.S. stock markets were closed for the weekend and unable to react to sudden global risk. Crypto markets, however, never paused: Bitcoin surged to $74,000. Commodities completed price discovery first on Hyperliquid—a decentralized prediction market—before traditional markets even opened. This wasn’t an isolated incident; the same occurred last month when China announced new policies.

Traditional hedge funds are increasingly entering this space. Crypto’s “24/7, 365-day” operation is no longer just a slogan—it’s a structural advantage traditional finance simply cannot match.

Nonetheless, crypto market valuations today remain far below what fundamentals would suggest. We’re undoubtedly in another bear market (my fourth), but this one is fundamentally different: regulation is becoming clearer, institutional capital has already arrived, and infrastructure is maturing rapidly.

This sentiment was especially palpable at the recent Consensus conference in Hong Kong. Asian market dynamism stood in stark contrast to the West—bipartisan government support, newly deployed institutional capital, and relentless focus on consumer-facing applications all fuel strong bullish sentiment.

Asia’s 2026 watchlist:

• Cross-border payments via stablecoins—especially in B2B contexts. For Asia’s fragmented economic systems, crypto-based payments are a natural fit.
• Tokenization of gold, equities, and real estate. Asian banks and fintech firms are catching up to U.S. progress.
• Perpetual futures trading on DeFi platforms. Driven by retail participation, growth may outpace that in the West.
• Prediction markets are poised to become a major vertical—albeit in forms distinct from their Western counterparts.

Core Trend: “Crypto as a Service”

The central theme of 2026 is the shift from “crypto as an industry” to “crypto as a service.” The goal is no longer to make blockchain visible to users—but to make it disappear entirely from their awareness.

For over a decade, we’ve obsessed over “crypto spectacles”—gas wars, TPS races, modular stacks, ZK proofs. The 2024 ETF approvals served as mainstream institutions’ formal endorsement. In 2025, we laid down the foundational infrastructure. In 2026, it’s time to pivot.

Leaving the “Casino” Era Behind

The next wave of unicorns won’t be L3 networks built for AI-NFTs. They’ll be companies that use blockchain to deliver tenfold improvements in product efficiency—hiding the technology entirely—thereby unlocking trillion-dollar markets.

This precisely reflects our recent investment thesis:

Novig: Ending the “Rake” Era ($75M Series B)

Traditional sports betting is a monopolistic, distorted market. Bookmakers extract exorbitant commissions from every wager, leaving users with abysmal win rates—just 2%. We led Novig’s $75 million Series B because they treat sports betting as a high-frequency financial product. Using a peer-to-peer trading model, Novig delivers an average user win rate of 23%. Most users don’t care whether a decentralized order book powers the backend—they only know they get the best odds in the U.S. This is “crypto as a service” in action.

Based: A Consumer-Grade Super App ($11.5M Series A)

We recently led Based’s Series A round. Built on the Hyperliquid ecosystem, Based is a composable, Web3 consumer-grade super app. “Consumer crypto” has long been synonymous with clunky UX. Based is changing that—delivering onchain interactions as smooth and seamless as top-tier fintech apps. Cross-chain bridging, gas fees, and other complexities are fully abstracted away; users notice none of it. They focus solely on the social and financial value their assets generate.

Doppler: Default Infrastructure for Asset Issuance ($9M Seed)

If Based and Novig are sleek new cars, Doppler is the high-performance fuel system. We led Doppler’s $9 million seed round to establish it as the default infrastructure for onchain asset issuance. It enables developers to issue assets with institutional-grade security and compliance—without rebuilding every foundational layer from scratch. Doppler is the Stripe for onchain assets—pure utility, wrapped in clean, simple APIs.

Why “Invisibility” Matters More Than “Viral Growth”

This trend toward “invisibility” permeates our entire portfolio:

• Real-world assets: Tokenized Treasuries are no longer crypto experiments—they’re becoming the backend liquidity backbone of global trade.
• AI agents: Blockchain provides AI agents with a trusted “truth layer” through prediction markets and verifiable data—enabling them to interact autonomously and credibly with digital assets.
• Agent-native payments will accelerate this further. Payment standards like x402 let AI agents transact directly using crypto assets. And increasing regulatory clarity around stablecoins makes this payment rail ever smoother.

Advice for Founders

If you’re launching a startup in 2026, my advice is simple: Stop talking about the tech—start talking about the problem you solve. If your pitch deck dedicates a slide to consensus mechanisms before one on customer ROI, your thinking is still stuck in 2022.

We back teams building the next Novig, Based, or Doppler—the ones who truly understand what “mass adoption” means: when a technology becomes so seamless that people forget it exists, that’s when it truly enters every household.