Every technology that changed the world did so by disappearing.
Nobody thinks about the electrical grid when they turn on a light. Nobody thinks about SMTP when they send an email. The technology became so reliable, so embedded in the products built on top of it, that it stopped being something people noticed. That’s where crypto is heading. And the projects that understand this will define the next decade of this industry.
Crypto’s infrastructure has gotten remarkably good, but it still demands to be seen. At the retail level, 70 percent of new wallet users drop off before completing setup. At the institutional level, treasury managers and reserve allocators who want exposure to digital assets still have to navigate fragmented infrastructure, custody complexity, and systems that behave unpredictably under stress. The technology asks too much of everyone who touches it, whether they’re a first-time user trying to send a payment or a fund manager trying to allocate capital with the same confidence they’d bring to treasuries or gold.
Open any crypto publication and the conversation is still about which chain is faster, which rollup has lower fees, which bridge is more secure. These are real engineering questions, but they are an incomplete measure of progress for an industry that claims to be building the future of finance. The TCP/IP debate felt like the most important conversation in technology in the early 1990s. It turned out to be a footnote. The companies that mattered were asking what people could actually do with the technology, not which version of it was technically superior.
What the dot-come bubble actually taught us
Technological revolutions tend to follow a pattern. There’s an infrastructure or installation phase where the new technology gets built out, speculated on, and debated endlessly on its own terms. Then there’s a deployment phase where the technology actually reaches people, usually by becoming invisible. The installation phase gets all the attention because it’s loud, speculative, and full of big claims. The deployment phase is where the actual industries get built, and it tends to happen quietly enough that most people don’t notice the transition until it’s already happened.
The internet’s installation phase looked like the late 1990s. Companies marketed protocols, pipes, and possibilities. Investors chased anything with “.com” in the name. The conversation centered on HTTP, servers, bandwidth, and dial-up versus broadband. The technology itself was the product. When the bubble burst, most of those companies disappeared. What emerged was the deployment phase, the application layer. Amazon made the technology invisible and led with utility. Users never needed to understand servers, databases, or packet routing. They bought books. Then they bought everything else.
Crypto is at this inflection point now. The installation phase has been long and expensive. Billions of dollars spent on infrastructure, multiple boom-bust cycles, an entire generation of builders learning what works under stress. The question is whether the industry can make the transition to deployment, where the technology disappears and the utility is all that remains.
Easier to use is not the same as ready to disappear
The industry is starting to move in the right direction. Account abstraction is replacing seed phrases with passkeys and social logins. Smart wallets are embedding custody into applications instead of forcing users to manage browser extensions. Chain abstraction protocols route transactions across networks without users choosing or even knowing which chain they’re on. Gasless transactions are removing the absurdity of needing one token to send another.
All of this represents genuine progress on what I’d call the surface layer: how users interact with the system. But fewer projects are working on the structural layer: how the system itself behaves under stress, whether the money is sound, whether the guarantees hold. Making an incomplete system easier to use is not the same as making a sound system invisible.
Stablecoins show the gap clearly. Visa is settling transactions on blockchain rails. Payments flow through crypto infrastructure without end users knowing or caring. In a narrow sense, that is invisible infrastructure working exactly as intended. But stablecoins are tokenization of existing money. The dollar moves faster and cheaper on these rails, which is genuinely useful, and Solana, Ethereum, and others are executing well on it. Better rails are valuable, and the teams building them are solving real problems. But crypto’s original ambition went further: financial systems that work differently at a fundamental level, with transparent rules, verifiable reserves, and mechanisms that don’t depend on trusting the right people to make the right decisions under pressure.
Vitalik made a related point in January when he declared that Ethereum had “backslided” and that 2026 would be the year it stopped compromising its values in the name of mainstream adoption. The instinct is right, and it applies well beyond Ethereum. Across the industry, there’s a real tension between making things easier to use and making sure what’s underneath is worth using. The two goals aren’t in conflict if the underlying systems are sound. If the reserves are real, and if the mechanisms work without intervention, then making it easy to use is the natural next step. The risk comes when the surface layer improves faster than the structural layer. That’s how you end up with products that feel polished but can’t withstand real stress, and more users exposed when something breaks.
What invisible actually requires
Traditional financial systems are pro-cyclical. Stress triggers margin calls, margin calls trigger selling, and selling deepens the stress. The 2008 financial crisis made this cascade visible to the world. Most DeFi systems inherited the same architecture. When crypto experienced its largest single-day liquidation event in October 2025, $19 billion unwound in 24 hours, the pattern repeated across the ecosystem. Cascading liquidations, broken pegs, governance that couldn’t respond fast enough.
Infrastructure that works in calm conditions but demands attention during crises is not invisible. It’s fragile. Genuinely invisible infrastructure works the same way regardless of what the market is doing. Deterministic systems that buy back assets automatically when prices fall below guaranteed thresholds. Lending facilities where borrowers face no liquidation risk because the collateral’s downside is funded by real reserves, not algorithmic assumptions. Supply mechanisms that expand and contract with market conditions rather than waiting on governance proposals to pass.
Some of these approaches already exist in production. Protocols are operating with treasuries in the hundreds of millions, executing programmatic buybacks automatically, and running lending facilities with zero liquidations across tens of millions in loans. During the October crash, these systems kept running. Not because someone intervened, but because the design never required intervention. That is what invisible actually looks like in practice, and it’s a category that more builders should be exploring.
Two races, one industry
The crypto industry is running two races at the same time, and most participants are only aware of one.
The visible race is about making existing infrastructure easier to use. This race matters and real progress is happening. Reown’s CEO put it well: mainstream users won’t say “I used a blockchain app,” they’ll say “I bought this thing.” That’s the right target for the surface layer, and teams building toward it deserve credit.
The less visible race is about building infrastructure that deserves to disappear. Systems where the guarantees are funded, the reserves are verifiable on-chain, and the mechanisms are sound enough to operate without anyone watching them. Most of the industry conversation right now, from a16z’s state of crypto reports to the chain abstraction discourse, focuses on the first race. Fewer people are talking about the second one. That’s understandable. UX improvements are tangible and demonstrable. Structural soundness is harder to see and harder to market. But it is the foundation everything else depends on.
Amazon won, but not because it had a clean website. The logistics, warehousing, and supply chain infrastructure behind that website actually worked at scale. The interface was the last mile. The system underneath was the reason it all held together. Crypto’s future runs on the same logic. The projects that matter long-term will be the ones where smooth onboarding reflects sound design underneath, not a surface layer papering over structural fragility.
What comes next?
The next wave of crypto adoption probably will not announce itself as crypto adoption. At the retail level, someone will save money somewhere with transparent, verifiable guarantees and never realize a protocol is managing reserves underneath. They’ll just use it because it works.
At the institutional level, the shift may be even more consequential. Treasury managers will allocate to reserve assets backed by deterministic, on-chain mechanisms and evaluate them the way they evaluate any other holding: on the soundness of the backing, the reliability of the yield, and the behavior under stress. They won’t need to understand the protocol any more than they need to understand the Federal Reserve’s plumbing to hold a treasury bond. The infrastructure will just work, and the allocation decision will be based on fundamentals rather than familiarity with crypto.
Whether the industry gets there depends on which race it takes more seriously. The surface layer is improving fast. The structural layer is where the harder work remains, and it’s the work that will ultimately determine whether crypto earns its place in serious portfolios and everyday financial life. That transition is underway. How quickly it happens depends on how many builders recognize that the goal was never to make people care about crypto. It was to make crypto good enough that they never have to.
