Somewhere along the way, crypto got boxed into being “just finance.” The mainstream paints it as speculation, gambling, or a playground for traders chasing quick gains. Regulators mostly frame it as a risky subset of fintech. But that lens misses the point. If you really want to grasp what’s happening, crypto should be talked about the same way we talked about the internet in the ’90s.
Look back at the early internet. In the beginning, it was dismissed as a toy for hobbyists and academics. Then came the dot-com boom and crash, which convinced skeptics that it was just a bubble. But beneath the noise, the infrastructure was being laid down, TCP/IP, HTTP, early browsers, that would later enable companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon. Crypto is going through that exact same phase right now. Everyone is staring at token charts while missing the deeper layer: a new global coordination and settlement system.
Take stablecoins as an example. They’ve quietly become the largest use case in crypto, moving over $7 trillion in value in 2023 alone, more than PayPal processed in the same year. That’s not “casino finance.” That’s infrastructure. USDC is being integrated into payment processors, PayPal launched its own dollar-backed stablecoin, and even Visa now settles transactions in USDC on Ethereum and Solana. This is exactly like when banks and businesses in the ’90s slowly realized they had to plug into the internet just to stay competitive.
Or look at Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 network. Within months of launching in 2023, it onboarded millions of new wallets, largely through integrations with apps people already use, like Friend.tech. That’s the AOL or Yahoo! moment, onramps that make an emerging protocol feel usable to the masses. Telegram is doing something similar with its TON-based wallet, letting hundreds of millions of users interact with crypto without even realizing they’re using a blockchain. That’s how the internet spread too, email and chat rooms, not because people cared about the underlying protocols.
And like the internet, crypto is a stack. At the base, you’ve got foundational protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum. On top of that come scaling solutions like rollups, liquidity layers like stablecoins, and interfaces like wallets. Then you get applications: DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, gaming. Eventually, no one will say “I’m using crypto.” They’ll just use apps that happen to run on-chain, the same way nobody today says “I’m using TCP/IP.” This is also why the “ban crypto” idea is naïve. You can regulate exchanges or restrict specific stablecoins, but you can’t ban open-source protocols. It’s like trying to ban email in 1998. Governments can slow adoption, but once people see a cheaper, faster, borderless way to move value, the concept doesn’t disappear. The internet proved that information wants to move freely. Crypto is proving that value wants to move freely too.
The frustrating part is how media coverage keeps shrinking the story to “digital casinos.” That’s the equivalent of dismissing the internet in 1999 as “chat rooms and stock bubbles.” The real story is infrastructure. It’s about rewiring how trust, ownership, and coordination work in the digital age. Whether it’s supply chains being verified in real time, artists building community economies through social tokens, or AI agents paying each other on-chain for services, these are the kinds of shifts crypto makes possible. So maybe it’s time we update the narrative. Crypto isn’t “Wall Street for nerds.” It’s the next layer of the internet, this time, for value. And if history is any guide, most people won’t fully understand it until it’s everywhere. By then, the conversation won’t be about whether it’s real, but about how we missed the signs staring us in the face.
Because once you talk about crypto like the internet, the question stops being “is this legit?” and becomes “how long until it’s impossible to live without it?
