The realization of crypto’s value proposition lies heavily on the depth of synergies it can create with existing institutions and infrastructure. I believe the endgame for crypto is adoption and more horizontal integrations. Not siloed value propositions.
Picture this: One fine afternoon, during the Christmas holiday last year; I arrive the IAH Airport, for my outbound international trip from the US with my wife and baby.
We queue for check-in. Gets to our turn. The attendant consults her computer a bit longer than usual. Her brows form a furrow. What might be the problem?
She further takes a little longer, then looks up and invites me away from the queue. She explains there’s been an “issue” with my booking. Apparently, the booking payment had been revoked by my bank —even though it had been fully charged.
I explore available next steps. Just two options, actually: A, forfeit the flight and go reschedule, or, B, pay right there and then, to “guarantee” my current booking in lieu of my pending bank resolution.
Option A wasn’t even an option, as all dates in the period were either fully booked or would be ridiculously expensive anyways, given the short notice.
Option B it was. Except, well, I was cash-strapped (as most of my funds weren’t available in the bank). And I only kept a few hundred dollars in my Bank of America account for emergency. Obviously, a ~$4,000 expense wasn’t within the scope of said “emergency”.
Reached out to a friend for an emergency bailout. Problem was, they weren’t based in the US, and hence, fund transfer of any sort had to be via international wire. Great. Except that would take days, not minutes. My flight was set to depart in less than 2 hours.
Crypto! My friend offered to use crypto for the transaction. Here is exactly how it went down:
After the conversation, I text him a USDT wallet address. Less than 30 seconds later, he’d moved ~$4,000 across international borders to me, right here, in the United States! Oh, and without paying a dollar in fees, too.
The next part involved moving the crypto to a fiat denomination. Offramp. I fire up my Binance crypto exchange app, and in a few minutes I had exchanged ~$4,000 in USDT and had the fiat equivalent funded to my BofA account, ready to pay the airline. Worked like magic!
All of this took much less than 20 minutes!
My little story right here (however anecdotal), represents the case for crypto. Cross-border transactions unimpeded by bureaucracy, bloat, or political marginalization.
This, I like to believe, is the manifest destiny of crypto.
The future of trustless, borderless finance is predicated on crypto. To achieve the critical mass necessary for adoption, there must, first, be an organic demand for its utility, beyond a mere instrument of speculation. Utility, in turn requires integrations at the different points of need.
We can attempt to understand crypto using a simple evaluation framework I first picked up from Moxie: useful for what? and, useful to whom? What exactly defines utility for crypto? Lofty ideals? Retail consumption? Core infrastructure for apps? Whatever the definition, one thing is certain: a successful mainstream crypto adoption will be dependent on synergies, rather than complete overhauls. Crypto-enabled synergies rather than crypto-based overhauls.
Synergies will require a lot of integrations in order to further cut down friction in the value capture and value delivery process. One of the biggest drivers of scale in software technology, especially on the infrastructural level, is integrations. Point integrations, application integrations, platform integrations, etc. A groundbreaking infrastructure is only as important as the access and ease of integration.
The opposite of this, of course, would be a walled garden and a closed ecosystem. Which is the status quo crypto seeks to challenge.
Crypto has yet a long way to go as far as adoption is concerned. Onboarding the next “billion users” shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself, anymore than a bouncing QR code Super Bowl Halftime ad.
