Crypto's End Game Is In Sight
One. A broad consortium announced the Alliance for OpenUSD, which directly challenges the current position of Circle's USDC. It indirectly reveals the open-ended opportunity space for competing payments-focused chains such as Lightning, Solana, Base, Polygon, Ripple, Arc, MegaETH, and Tempo. And probably shoulders out traditional crime-coin ecosystems, such as Tether and Tron.
The winner(s) of stablecoins will most likely not adhere to recognizable crypto values.
Two. My kid used an agent to make a website. He wanted to accept payments. The agent built him a PayPal link, which was just as easy as, or easier than, adding buttons built on Stripe, CashApp, or pay-with-crypto.
In America, Europe, and almost all of East Asia, payments without crypto are easier than payments with crypto. Crypto only seems to be arguably better than the alternatives in: parts of South America, Africa, and the UAE for portability reasons when live missiles start falling.1
In payments, including agentic payments, the fight is not about fair access. It is an opportunity for newer big players to take bites out of older incumbents.
Three. Bitcoin has no more marginal buyers. Strategy's business model has collapsed, or evolved, depending on your perspective. All of retail/HNW has had opportunities to buy, and those who did buy are down >50%, with that wealth simply being transferred to crypto OGs including VCs who sold crypto when bitcoin was above $100k. Much of it happened openly but non-transparently, inside elevated DAT valuations and/or pricing shenanigans around DAT acquisition of crypto assets. Forward-thinking pension funds/governments2 have already round-tripped their crypto journeys. The Trump family privatized $1bn to $2bn+ in social/memetic value, taking it out of circulation from the crypto economy. An eventual non-MAGA-aligned government will surely seek to weaken that family's wealth and power.
Going forward, Bitcoin's valuation will be purely based on PvP recycling. No net-new money will enter the industry.
at the extremes, crypto is worse than other forms of money, particularly for normal people, in Russia and Iran. It is better than other forms of money in North Korea. And in Ukraine, but only as long as it remains an enemy of Russia. Is crypto better than non-crypto monies in Lebanon?↩
Harvard, Bhutan↩