Crypto’s Path Forward In The Next 10 Years
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Companies
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Key Quotes
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Topics
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Insights
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: Crypto’s Path Forward In The Next 10 Years
This 40-minute panel discussion, hosted by Jack Kubinec for the Solana-focused podcast Light Speed, convened builders and investors to dissect the central challenge facing the crypto industry: acquiring and retaining real, non-speculative users. The consensus was that the industry has historically failed at retention due to a focus on speculative, casino-like incentives, and the path forward requires making the underlying blockchain technology invisible to the end-user.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus was Consumer Adoption and User Retention in Crypto/Web3. Key themes included:
- The failure of speculative incentives to drive long-term user engagement.
- Strategies for onboarding traditional businesses and consumers by abstracting away crypto complexity.
- The critical importance of branding, marketing, and consumer-centric product design over pure financialization.
- The future role of exchanges and the potential for blockchain as an invisible backend infrastructure.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Abstraction of Complexity: The most successful consumer adoption will occur when users interact with services (like mobile plans or bank accounts) where the crypto/blockchain rails are completely invisible, eliminating the need for users to “Connect Wallet.”
- Focus on Utility over Financialization: Products predicated solely on token price volatility or speculative schemes are unsustainable. True value capture requires building utility that solves real-world problems (e.g., reducing payment processing fees) independent of market conditions.
- Consumer-First Language: Developers must shift their language from crypto-native terms (“Create Wallet”) to familiar consumer terms (“Create Account”) to expand the Total Addressable Market (TAM).
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Inversion Capital Thesis: Santi’s firm, Inversion Capital, is betting on acquiring struggling traditional businesses and implementing blockchain rails to create a “step function improvement” in efficiency (e.g., eliminating 2-4% payment processing fees).
- The “Toxic Incentive” Problem: Many crypto projects are currently profitable by catering only to existing capital (farming, token pumps), creating perverse incentives against building for net-new users.
- Tangible Benefits Drive Onboarding: The most effective onboarding mechanism is providing an immediate, tangible financial benefit. Backes demonstrated this by showing users the direct savings from using crypto payments versus credit cards, attracting older, non-crypto-native users.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Santi (Inversion Capital): Championing the strategy of acquiring traditional businesses to embed crypto rails invisibly for mass adoption.
- Luca (Pudgy Penguins): Highlighting the shift from speculative crypto builds to IP-driven businesses that focus on capturing the “heart and mind” of consumers, evidenced by their success in physical retail (Walmart/Amazon).
- Sfi (Backes): Discussing their success in onboarding older demographics by making the value proposition about saving money on luxury goods (spirits) rather than the technology itself.
- Stripe: Mentioned as a major indicator of the trend, having acquired companies (Bridge, Privy) to integrate stablecoin and crypto capabilities, signaling readiness for mainstream efficiency gains.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
- Santi noted the intentional timing of launching Inversion Capital immediately following a major political shift (Trump’s election), emphasizing that the regulatory environment is a crucial factor when attempting large-scale, real-world adoption of blockchain technology.
6. Future Implications
The conversation strongly suggests that the next decade of crypto growth will not come from DeFi innovation alone, but from infrastructure that is successfully integrated into existing, trusted consumer and enterprise workflows. The industry must transition from being a speculative destination to becoming the invisible, superior settlement layer for the internet, mirroring how e-commerce removed friction from retail.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Web3 Founders, Product Managers, Venture Capitalists, and Strategists focused on scaling crypto beyond the existing native user base and achieving mainstream adoption.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
ChatGPT
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N/A (Technology)
OpenAI
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N/A (Technology)
Robinhood
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N/A (Traditional Finance)
NASDAQ
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N/A (Traditional Finance)
New York Stock Exchange
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N/A (Traditional Finance)
Nike
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Web3 infrastructure companies
Shopify
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Traditional Business (Contextual)
Backpack
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Project/Company (Unspecified)
New Bank
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unknown
Because I
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unknown
If Python
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unknown
Sixman Ventures
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unknown
South America
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unknown
The Great Firewall
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unknown
Bitcoin ETFs
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unknown
💬 Key Insights
"I'm simultaneously extremely bullish in crypto, and so give me as much exposure to crypto as possible. However, I don't know how to express that sentiment because of all of this red tape that exists that prevents them from legally spending dollars to get exposure to the asset class."
"I actually think more value will be captured by non-crypto-native companies that come into this industry and realize, 'I'm going to use stablecoins. I'm going to use a DeepIn network where I'm going to use Backpack's crypto-as-a-service infrastructure to go into a new market and leverage that technology because it's composable,'"
"I think, you know, we have anywhere from 30 to 60 million active users on chain today for a trillion-plus dollar industry. User aggregation theory will continue to be the case for this industry. And to Luca's point, you know, if you sort of the last 10 years have been very much predicated on building infrastructure, more value over the next 10 years will be created at the user aggregation layer."
"If apps on the chains aren't worth more than the chains, the thing is going to be broken."
"You're starting to see that play out already where today, I think the FSA kind of announced that, you know, they're reclassifying crypto as an asset class, where, you know, traditionally it's been taxed as a currency at 55%. We expect that to go down to 20% kind of over the next year or so."
"You literally can't buy a ChatGPT subscription [in mainland China]. ... we see a lot of people demanding real-world use cases in Asia. You know, asking for things like debit cards, asking for, you know, savings accounts, asking for yield—all the things that I think folks in the US might think, 'Oh, this is like old stuff,' or whatever. Folks in Asia are very much looking at the lens of, 'Oh, wow, this is actually, you know, liberty-inducing, and it allows me to actually do stuff with my money that I'm actually not allowed to do with right now.'"
📊 Topics
#artificialintelligence
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#startup
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#generativeai
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#investment
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🧠 Key Takeaways
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