Crypto users are expanding rapidly beyond on-chain native audiences. Most new users access blockchain functionality through intermediaries and embedded abstractions. A growing layer of infrastructure hides the underlying complexity of blockchain, enabling adoption without users being explicitly aware they are using crypto. As a result, real-world blockchain usage is scaling quickly.
Common use cases include:
- Stablecoin and on-chain payments by institutions and enterprises. For example, BitPay enables purchases such as Ferrari with ETH, and our portfolio company Align supports enterprises with cross-border payments.
- Consumer applications that embed blockchain functionality. Starbucks previously launched NFT-based loyalty programs. Polymarket and Kalshi settle prediction markets on-chain, while Fomo lowers the barrier for retail users to trade crypto assets.
- Fintech platforms such as Revolut and Robinhood that integrate crypto into user familiar financial workflows.
Infrastructure opportunities emerge from two main forces:
- Existing platforms want to integrate crypto capabilities quickly to stay competitive but lack in-house expertise.
- Infrastructure must scale to support rising transaction volumes as crypto access becomes simpler and penetrates everyday applications.
Potential investment opportunities
- Infrastructure solutions enabling fintechs and banks to:
- Access real-time and historical, structured, omnichain on-chain data
- Integrate trading functionality
- Support on- and off-ramps
- Provide core wallet features
- Handle bookkeeping and reconciliation
- Meet compliance requirements
- Manage team and treasury wallets
- Enable stablecoin payments
- Launch white-label stablecoin issuance
- Infrastructure that simplifies blockchain integration for consumer apps, allowing users to remain in existing workflows while developers iterate faster:
- Wallet-as-a-service
- Account abstraction
Key risks
- Regulatory uncertainty
- Dependency on major platforms and distribution channels
- Margin compression from infrastructure consolidation
AI Penetration into Crypto Apps
AI features will increasingly be embedded into existing crypto applications to reduce complexity and smooth user workflows. However, trading remains highly stochastic and adversarial, and AI cannot reliably guarantee better outcomes. As a result, it is difficult for AI-native crypto apps to deliver a generalized, transformative, and consistently reliable user experience on their own.
Potential investment opportunities
Crypto AI builders consistently cite bottlenecks around data, prompt quality, secure guardrails, tool integration, model performance, and cost efficiency in real-world crypto scenarios. These constraints create several infrastructure-level opportunities:
- Web3-native agents with API access that can serve as shared primitives across the ecosystem
- Real-time, omnichain, structured on-chain data
- High-quality historical data for complex analysis and backtesting
- Plugins and tooling for routine on-chain actions, including lending, yield strategies, trading, and wallet operations
- Security guardrails for onchain activities like trading and DeFi.
Key risk
- AI integrations fail to measurably improve core product metrics for existing crypto applications
DePIN continues to solve big problems
DePIN takes time to mature. Building a reliable supply network can take years, and discovering sustained demand often takes just as long. However, DePIN is uniquely positioned to address large, risky, yet highly profitable problems at a global scale. As geopolitical tensions intensify and the world moves toward deglobalization, DePIN becomes a powerful coordination mechanism, aligning economic incentives and shared vision to connect participants across countries and cultures.
Potential problem areas
- Electricity markets, including flexibility markets and broader energy trading
- Compute markets
- Telecommunications infrastructure
- Mapping and geospatial data
- Weather data and forecasting
Some other potential trends
- Institutions are increasingly adopting blockchain and DeFi, with a strong emphasis on compliance, privacy, and risk management. Their evaluation criteria differ from consumer blockchains. To participate effectively in DeFi lending and borrowing, they require institutional-grade infrastructure, robust risk controls, and access mechanisms, often via brokerages. On the yield side, institutions might tend to prefer structured products rather than simple on-chain yield strategies.
- RWA opportunities are concentrated in Treasury bonds, stocks, and money market funds. Institutions want to move money market funds on-chain to improve liquidity and enable faster, more efficient subscriptions and redemptions. This makes it easier to attract idle capital from enterprise and institution investor. Tokenized stocks can further enhance capital efficiency by enabling stock lending, improved yield, and clearer rights management like voting and dividends.
- Blockchain is a powerful substrate for building and organizing ecosystems. It lowers the barrier for developers to build applications plus open infrastructure. As traction grows, the core team can shift focus toward infrastructure while enabling the community to build applications and frontends. On-chain reward-sharing mechanisms are easier to implement, aligning incentives so top builders are motivated to contribute to the ecosystem rather than compete against it.
- Altcoins need to rethink their strategy. They must build narratives around real traction and usage, not just technology or vision. This shift is necessary to appeal to institutional investors, who are expected to contribute increasing liquidity to the market. Accordingly, altcoins should evolve their pitch from one tailored to retail participants to one that resonates with traditional financial investors.