It's not that crypto has become boring, it's that you've finally understood the rules of the game.

Author: Christian Catalini

Translation: TechFlow

Original Title: If You Think Crypto Has Become "Boring," It Means You Understand the Endgame

Photo: Alex Blania and Sam Altman at the "World Unwrapped" event in San Francisco on December 11, 2025

Christian Catalini

If you have been following the cryptocurrency space, you may have noticed that everything seems to be accelerating recently. Usually, this means "numbers are going up," but this time the driving force is not a bull market or a breakthrough in crypto technology, but rather that the rules are finally starting to be clearly defined.

With stablecoin regulation gradually falling into place, the industry's "handbrake" has finally been released. Projects are accelerating their shift from "serving crypto insiders" to truly mainstream market products. After all, when you no longer have to constantly worry about breaking the law, you can focus more boldly on building real business models.

It turns out that when the foundational components are in place—when stablecoins are no longer a lingering existential threat but a regulated business—the definition of "ambition" also changes.

You are no longer trying to reinvent the concept of money, but instead start focusing on building truly useful products. The "last mile" obstacles that previously limited blockchain development are gradually disappearing, mainly because decentralized networks are finally starting to do the obvious, even somewhat boring things: acknowledging that one of the most useful functions of blockchain—at least at this stage—is to connect it to Visa cards.

Anonymity Vulnerability

Payments have always been the foundational layer that cryptocurrency must first break through. Payments are the basic primitive function for everything else. Satoshi Nakamoto had already provided almost all the necessary elements for an electronic cash system: a digital asset, a global ledger, and the incentive mechanism to support its operation. However, to enable payments to scale securely, identity verification is essential. This is because modern money is not just a measure of value, but also a carrier of intent that needs to be verified.

Bitcoin cleverly solved the double-spending problem, ensuring that digital cash cannot be copy-pasted, but it did not solve the problem of identity authentication. Although some people see anonymity as a feature, for global adoption, this is actually a major vulnerability. During the design of Libra, I realized this deeply. The first compromise we had to make was to give up non-custodial wallets: although we designed many clever ways to ensure their security, from day one, regulators required us to establish a safe and controlled boundary. Society strongly prefers to ensure that the financial system does not support illicit financial activities, and if your permissionless protocol accidentally funds terrorism, society will eventually revoke your permission.

Stablecoin Sandwich Phenomenon

The current state of cryptocurrency is a textbook case of "infrastructure inversion." In theory, we will eventually have advanced zero-knowledge proofs and onchain attestations, perfectly balancing privacy and compliance. However, the reality is that, for now, we are just patching new technology onto old technology in the most unexciting way.

Take the "stablecoin sandwich" as an example. This is an industry term referring to the process of converting fiat to stablecoin, transferring it via blockchain networks, and then converting the stablecoin back to fiat on the other end, thus connecting two otherwise independent real-time domestic payment systems. This approach does work, but its scaling is full of irony. It does not rely on the openness of crypto networks. Enterprises do not connect directly to permissionless networks because that would require extra work. Instead, they usually hire a coordinating service provider to perform compliance checks and interact with the blockchain on their behalf.

This situation is far from the vision of controlling one's own destiny and instead brings intermediaries back to center stage. It turns out that blockchain does solve the settlement problem—that is, the transfer of value—but ignores the problem of information. In traditional financial systems, every payment comes with relevant data: who initiated the payment, what the payment is for, and whether the payer is on a sanctions list. If you cannot transmit this information, then even if you can settle payments in seconds, it is meaningless, because the recipient's bank, due to legal requirements, will still reject the transaction.

Human Currency?

So, what will the future look like? The "Yesterday’s World" (formerly Worldcoin) event held in San Francisco yesterday offered a potential answer, and surprisingly, it involves a chrome sphere. At the event, Alex Blania and Sam Altman took the stage to reminisce about the past, when the prospect of AI devouring the internet was not yet so obvious. However, one thing was clear to them: being able to distinguish a human from a robot would eventually become the most valuable resource in the world. This pursuit of "Proof of Personhood" drove Blania to build a custom hardware network to verify whether users are indeed biological entities.

After six years of development, what once seemed like an awkward futurist experiment—"scanning everyone’s irises"—is now gradually shedding its gimmicky label and beginning to show practical value. Sam Altman quoted Paul Buchheit, who summed up the key point precisely: "In the future, there may be two kinds of currency: machine currency and human currency." It turns out that "Proof of Personhood" is the compliance function of the AI era. To scale payments, you need this technology to distinguish between good and bad actors; and in a world full of infinite synthetic content, you need it to prove the only scarce thing: that something was indeed created by a human.

For years, the dream of cryptocurrency has been to build a global version of Venmo (an app similar to WeChat Pay) based on cryptography. At yesterday’s "World" (formerly Worldcoin) event, they showcased a wallet that basically achieves this goal. Although the underlying infrastructure is quite similar to traditional fintech architecture, by integrating virtual bank accounts from 18 countries, a Visa card, and local payment networks, they have successfully bridged the gap between crypto and reality. It turns out that what users really need for global fund flows is not a new token, but a simple solution where they can deposit their salary and swipe a Visa card. And the way to attract users to adopt this service is the classic tech growth model: World charges no fees for most services.

Part of the reason is that banks need to charge fees to collect rent, while World does not. But more importantly, the core of this model is that fund flows should be low-cost. For banks, a wire transfer may require a "diplomatic mission" through three correspondent banks and a fax machine; for blockchain, it is just an update to the ledger. World is betting that the actual cost of moving funds will approach zero.

App Store Arbitrage

Innovation is not limited to payments; it continues to expand. Back in 2024, I predicted that "Mini Apps" could become the "killer app" in the crypto space. The prediction was that when they first appeared, they might seem "clunky, niche, or even toy-like." This may sound trivial, even a bit boring, but its impact on market structure is profound. The significance of Mini Apps is not just embedding a calculator in your X (formerly Twitter) feed, but allowing developers to distribute software without app store approval or paying up to a 30% cut. It turns out that escaping the "walled garden" is just another way for developers to keep their own revenue. The most valuable feature a new ecosystem can offer developers is freeing them from the "landlord’s" cut when handling payments.

The combination of Mini Apps and strong identity verification provides developers with a new set of foundational features and also signals World’s strategic transformation. In the past, World’s strategy was more forceful—"scan your iris or leave," which was clearly too doctrinaire. Now, World has adopted a tiered service approach, offering verified "human identity" as an advanced feature. This market mechanism is more reasonable. Users may hesitate to scan their biometrics for an abstract future reward, but if it means higher yields or a more interesting experience, they are likely to participate willingly. For example, the team demonstrated how Japanese Tinder users use World ID for identity verification. It turns out that the "killer app" for sovereign identity may be proving to your date that you are not a robot. If you doubt whether users will give up their biometric data for convenience, just ask those willing to scan their eyes to skip the security line at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

Beyond the Record

Blania clearly understands the platform paradox: you want top online marketplaces, social networks, chatbots, and financial services to adopt World ID as a foundational feature, but they will not do so until you have enough users. And without a product, you cannot attract users. Therefore, you have to build the product yourself to attract users.

This also explains World’s layout in payments and its expansion into messaging. World is working with Shane Mac’s team to directly integrate the decentralized messaging protocol XMTP into the app. Compared to centralized alternatives like Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram, this approach offers significant privacy advantages. It turns out that if you want to be the invisible identity layer of the internet, you may first need to demonstrate your capabilities by building a better messaging product.

Before the event started, Shane Mac showed me his latest experimental project—Convos. This app is also based on XMTP, showing that crypto interoperability is not limited to financial services but can also extend to everyday communication tools. Convos uses cryptography to provide an experience with no registration, phone numbers, history, or tracking. Of course, none of this relies on centralized servers.

The selling point here is that this may be the first truly "trace-free" messaging app. In a world where every Slack message and email is saved forever, conversations that actually disappear are becoming the ultimate luxury. I think the earliest users may be investigative journalists, but the broader vision is to reset private conversation as the default mode of human interaction, not a suspicious exception.

Overall, although these experiments are still in their early stages, the trajectory is already clear. The infrastructure of cryptography is finally catching up with the original manifesto. Everything envisioned by crypto enthusiasts a decade ago is slowly becoming "boring" enough to be practical, and all this is happening at a critical moment. As artificial intelligence accelerates, the ability to use cryptography to verify truth is no longer just a philosophical hobby for cypherpunks, but an indispensable infrastructure for the entire digital economy.