Written by Oliver, Mars Finance
We're at a divisive moment in the crypto world. On one hand, there's an unprecedented surge of institutional enthusiasm: Wall Street giants like BlackRock and Fidelity are embracing Bitcoin with unprecedented force, their spot ETFs siphoning off tens of billions of dollars in traditional capital. Sovereign wealth funds and national pension funds are also quietly incorporating crypto assets into their vast investment portfolios. This surge has made the narrative of "cryptocurrency going mainstream" ring incredibly true.
On the other hand, for the general public, the crypto world has never seemed so distant. Beyond wild price fluctuations and the stories of a few speculators, it barely registers in daily life. The once-booming NFT market has languished, and the once-highly anticipated Web3 games have failed to break through. This stark disparity creates a core contradiction: on one hand, the financial elite feast, while on the other, the mainstream world watches from the sidelines. How should we understand this disconnect?
It is against this backdrop that Visa executives, including CEO Alfred F. Kelly Jr., have repeatedly made a profound observation: cryptocurrency is at a stage similar to "e-commerce in the early 1990s." While not yet fully understood by the public, its underlying technology and ecosystem are rapidly maturing and poised for a "super inflection point" in its adoption curve. Research from institutions such as Wells Fargo provides data support for this analogy. The report shows that the cryptocurrency user adoption curve bears a striking resemblance to that of the internet in the early 1990s. Even though the internet was launched in 1983, by 1995, less than 1% of the global population was using it. This figure is strikingly similar to the percentage of cryptocurrency users today. History shows that disruptive technologies often undergo a long, slow, and often confusing ramp-up period before experiencing explosive growth.
However, this seemingly perfect analogy may obscure a deeper truth. History doesn't simply repeat itself. Today's crypto world is being completely rewritten by two variables that were unimaginable back then: the entry of financial "regular forces" and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). This isn't just a repetition of history; it's an accelerated evolution with a completely different form.
Giants of the Old World, Pioneers of the New
The e-commerce revolution of the 1990s was a classic game of "disruptors." Amazon, eBay, and PayPal were all upstarts rising from the fringes of mainstream business, challenging established giants like Walmart and Citigroup with radically new rules. It was a heroic era for garage entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, a story defined by "disruption" and "replacement."
Today, the story of cryptocurrency unfolds in a completely different light. The most compelling pioneers are no longer just hooded cypherpunks; they also include the well-dressed, formal financial forces from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They aren't seeking to destroy the old world; rather, they're attempting to "transfer" it entirely onto a new technological foundation. The breadth and depth of this "inside-out" transformation were fully demonstrated in 2025.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink's prophecy of asset tokenization is accelerating. Following the resounding success of its 2024 Bitcoin spot ETF, BlackRock partnered with Securitize to launch its first tokenized fund, BUIDL, on Ethereum. This transforms shares of traditional money market funds into tokens that can be traded 24/7 on the blockchain. Meanwhile, the number of companies holding crypto assets as strategic reserves (known as DATCOs) has surged, with the total amount of crypto assets held on their balance sheets exceeding a historic $100 billion.
A more crucial variable is the shift in the US government's attitude. The previously ambiguous and sometimes hostile regulatory environment saw a decisive shift in 2025. Not only did the US government itself become a significant holder of Bitcoin (confiscating nearly 200,000 Bitcoins through law enforcement), but more importantly, it began to establish clear "rules of the game" for the industry. The GENIUS Act, signed in July, is the first comprehensive federal regulatory framework for stablecoins in the United States, providing a compliant path for this market, valued at over $250 billion. Subsequently, an executive order allowing $9 trillion in US pension funds to invest in alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies opened up a massive influx of new capital. This top-down recognition fundamentally altered the risk-reward calculus for institutional investors and solidified the foundations of this transformation.
AI: Finding “new species” in native economic soil
If the entry of financial giants paved the highway from the crypto world to the real world, then the explosion of artificial intelligence brought the first batch of true "natives" to this new continent.
The internet in 1995 solved the problem of connecting people with information and goods. The essence of e-commerce is to digitize and bring human commercial activities online. The next era we are entering will be one of economic collaboration between AI and AI. As a new productivity force, AI is creating digital content, code, designs, and even scientific discoveries at an unprecedented rate. The value created by AI urgently requires a compatible, native economic system.
Cryptography is precisely designed for this purpose. Imagine this scenario: an AI design program autonomously creates a unique work of art. Through a smart contract, it can mint this work into an NFT (non-fungible token), thereby obtaining unique and verifiable ownership. Subsequently, another AI marketing program can discover this NFT and autonomously decide to pay a small cryptocurrency fee to promote it on social media. If an AI purchasing agent for a clothing brand takes a fancy to the design, it can directly interact with the smart contract holding the NFT, automatically pay the licensing fee, and obtain permission to produce 1,000 T-shirts. The entire process requires no human intervention; the creation, ownership, transfer, and distribution of value are all completed instantly on-chain.
This isn't science fiction. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has pointed out that the combination of AI and crypto can solve core problems in both: AI requires trusted rules and asset ownership, while the crypto world requires autonomous "users." This symbiotic relationship is spawning new application scenarios. For example, decentralized computing networks like the Akash Network allow AI developers to rent idle GPU computing power worldwide using cryptocurrency. On-chain AI models, on the other hand, attempt to build more transparent and censorship-resistant intelligent systems through token economic incentives.
This AI-native economic activity could reach a scale and speed far exceeding the combined power of human commerce. What it requires is a globally unified, low-friction, and programmable value settlement layer. This is the core value of cryptography and a grand vision that the internet of the 1990s could never achieve.
Are we looking for the next "Amazon" or "TCP/IP"?
Faced with such changes, investors and builders often ask: Who will be the "Amazon" or "Google" of the crypto world?
This question itself may be limited by historical experience. Amazon's success is built on the Web 2.0 platform economy model—a centralized company attracts a massive user base by providing superior services, ultimately creating a winner-takes-all network effect. However, the core spirit of the crypto world lies in "protocols" rather than "platforms." Its goal is to create an open, neutral, and permissionless public infrastructure like TCP/IP (the underlying communication protocol of the internet).
Therefore, the future winner may not be a closed commercial empire, but an open ecosystem or a widely adopted underlying standard. We may see a Layer 2 network (such as Arbitrum or Optimism) become the de facto carrier for the vast majority of applications due to its superior performance and developer ecosystem; or a cross-chain communication protocol (such as LayerZero or Axelar) become the "value router" connecting all blockchains; or a decentralized identity (DID) standard become the unified pass for all users to enter the digital world.
The winners at these "protocol" layers will have business models very different from Amazon's. They won't profit by charging hefty platform taxes, but rather by capturing the value of the entire ecosystem's growth through their native tokens. They will be more like public utilities, like city roads and water systems, than monolithic supermarkets.
Of course, this doesn't mean there aren't opportunities at the application layer. Great companies will continue to emerge on top of these open protocols. However, the key to their success will no longer be building closed moats, but rather how to better leverage these open protocols to create unique value for users.
Finally, back to that quote: If you're willing to view Visa's CEO's judgment as a signal rather than a resolution, the more important question is, "How do we translate that signal into practice?" For businesses, this is a comprehensive process, from strategic alignment and compliance preparation to product launch. For individual and institutional investors, it's about distinguishing long-term perspectives from short-term fluctuations, neither blindly following nor passively avoiding them, and seeking on-chain use cases that can generate value in the real economy.
History offers us two things: a mirror, allowing us to see possible paths; and lessons, reminding us that the ultimate winners are often not the fastest speculators, but those who build enduring infrastructure and platforms that generate real demand and endure across cycles. Today's crypto landscape is simultaneously unfolding two stories: a short, bustling market and a long, slowly taking shape infrastructure. If Visa's predictions are correct, the next decade will be crucial for the latter's accelerated mainstream adoption.
