a few years ago everyone wanted to build the next bitcoin.
then everyone wanted to build the next ethereum.
then the next solana.
the next ai token.
the next memecoin.
the next whatever happened to be trending that month.
meanwhile, the companies quietly making money weren't trying to become the next anything.
they were building the plumbing.
most people don't wake up excited about payment processors.
or cloud providers.
or databases.
they care about the apps.
the visible part.
the thing they actually touch.
crypto isn't much different.
everyone talks about tokens.
almost nobody talks about the infrastructure moving billions of dollars every day.
stablecoins.
wallets.
rpc providers.
bridges.
indexers.
analytics.
custody.
none of them are particularly exciting.
all of them are surprisingly important.
there's an old idea that people during a gold rush made more money selling shovels than digging for gold.
it's repeated so often that it almost sounds cliché.
but crypto keeps proving it true.
every bull market creates new traders.
those traders need wallets.
those wallets need infrastructure.
that infrastructure needs servers.
those servers need monitoring.
everything depends on something less interesting sitting underneath it.
that's usually where the money ends up.
i've started paying less attention to which token is trending.
and more attention to which products people keep opening every morning.
that's a much harder metric to fake.
nobody uses something every day because of hype.
they use it because it solves a problem.
that's why stablecoins fascinate me.
nobody posts screenshots celebrating that they successfully moved usdc from one country to another.
there's no excitement.
no dopamine.
just value moving from point a to point b.
which is exactly what money is supposed to do.
maybe that's the strange thing about crypto.
the closer it gets to becoming useful...
the less interesting it looks from the outside.
real adoption doesn't usually arrive with fireworks.
it arrives looking almost boring.
sometimes i wonder if we're measuring the wrong things.
we celebrate market caps.
price charts.
airdrops.
daily volume.
but maybe the more interesting number is much simpler.
how many people opened this app today because they actually needed it?
not because they expected to get rich.
because they needed it.
those are completely different users.
i have a feeling the next decade of crypto won't be won by whoever creates the loudest blockchain.
it'll be won by whoever builds software people forget they're even using.
the internet already did that.
maybe crypto is about to do the same.
wdyt?
are we still investing in crypto...
or are we slowly investing in infrastructure that just happens to use blockchains?
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