Written by: Pyrs Carvolth, Christian Crowley, a16z

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

In the current cycle of blockchain applications, founders are learning a disturbing yet profound lesson: enterprises do not buy the "best" technology; they buy the least disruptive upgrade path.

For decades, new enterprise-level technologies have promised an order of magnitude improvement over traditional infrastructure: faster settlements, lower costs, cleaner architectures. Yet, in reality, the implementation rarely aligns perfectly with the technological advantages.

This means: if your product is "clearly better" but still fails, the gap is not in performance but in product fit.

This article is addressed to a group of founders in the crypto space: those who started in public chain scenarios and are now struggling to pivot to enterprise-level business. For many, this represents a huge blind spot. Below, we share several key insights based on our experiences, successful cases of founders selling products to enterprises, and genuine feedback from enterprise buyers, to help you better market and secure orders from enterprises.

What Does "Best" Really Mean

Within large enterprises, "the best technology" is the technology that perfectly integrates with existing systems, approval processes, risk models, and incentive structures.

SWIFT is slow and expensive, yet it remains unshaken. Why? Because it provides shared governance and regulatory certainty. COBOL is still in use because rewriting stable systems poses survival risks. Batch file transfers still exist because they create clear checkpoints and audit trails.

A possibly uncomfortable conclusion is that the adoption of blockchain by enterprises is hindered not by a lack of education or vision but by misalignment in product design. Founders who insist on pushing the most perfect technological form will continuously hit walls. Those who treat enterprise constraints as design inputs rather than compromise solutions are the most likely to succeed.

Therefore, it is not necessary to downplay the value of blockchain; the key is to help technical teams package a version that enterprises can accept, which requires the following ideas.

Enterprises Fear Loss Far More Than They Love Gains

When founders market to enterprises, they often make a mistake: assuming that decision-makers are primarily driven by gains—better technology, faster systems, lower costs, cleaner architectures, etc.

The reality is, the core motivation for enterprise buyers is to minimize downside risk.

Why? In large organizations, the cost of failure is asymmetric. This is the opposite of small startups, and founders who have not worked in large companies can easily overlook this point. Missing out on opportunities seldom results in penalties, but making obvious mistakes (especially those related to unfamiliar new technologies) can severely impact one's career, trigger audits, or even attract regulatory scrutiny.

Decision-makers rarely directly benefit from the technology they recommend. Even if strategic alignment and company-wide investments exist, the benefits are diluted and indirect. But losses are immediate and often personal.

The result is that enterprise decision-making is rarely driven by "what could be" and more by "what is highly unlikely to fail." This is why many "better" technologies struggle to gain traction. The threshold for implementation is often not technical superiority, but whether using the technology will make a decision-maker's job safer or riskier.

Therefore, you must rethink: who is your customer? One of the most common mistakes founders make when selling to enterprises is assuming that "the most technically knowledgeable person" is the buyer. In reality, enterprise implementation is rarely driven by technical belief but more by organizational dynamics.

In large organizations, decisions look less at gains and more at risk management, coordination costs, and accountability. At an enterprise scale, most organizations will outsource part of the decision-making process to consulting firms, not because they lack intelligence or expertise, but because critical decisions must be continually validated and substantiated. Introducing well-known third parties can provide external endorsement, dilute responsibility, and also offer credible evidence when decisions later face scrutiny. Most Fortune 500 companies operate this way, resulting in significant consulting fees in their annual budgets.

In other words: the larger the institution, the more decisions must withstand internal scrutiny afterward. As the saying goes: "No one gets fired for hiring McKinsey."

How Enterprises Make Decisions

Enterprise decision-making resembles how many people currently use ChatGPT: we do not let it make decisions for us, but use it to validate ideas, weigh pros and cons, and reduce uncertainty, all while remaining accountable to ourselves.

The behavior patterns of enterprises are largely similar; only their decision-making support layers are comprised of people, not large models.

New decisions must pass through layers of hurdles including legal, compliance, risk, procurement, security, and executive oversight. The concerns at each level differ, such as:

• What problems could arise?
• Who is responsible if problems occur?
• How does this align with existing systems?
• How do I explain this decision to executives, regulators, or the board?

Therefore, for truly meaningful innovative projects, "customers" are almost never a single buyer. The so-called "buyers" are actually a coalition of stakeholders, many of whom are more concerned about not making mistakes than about innovation.

Many technically superior products often fail for this reason: it is not that they cannot be used, but that there are no suitable people within the organization to safely utilize them.

For example, consider an online gambling platform. As prediction markets gain popularity, crypto "water sellers" (such as deposit channel service providers) may see online sports betting platforms as natural enterprise customers. However, to do this, you must first understand: the regulatory framework for online sports betting is different from that of prediction markets, including the separate licenses of various states. Knowing that different states have varying regulatory attitudes towards crypto, deposit service providers will realize: their customers are not the teams wanting to integrate crypto liquidity products, engineering, or business teams, but rather the legal, compliance, and financial teams who care about the risks associated with existing betting licenses and core fiat operations.

The simplest solution is to identify decision-makers as early as possible. Do not hesitate to ask your product supporters (those who like your product) how to help them market internally. Behind the scenes often stand legal, compliance, risk, financing, and security… They all hold unspoken veto power and have entirely different concerns. Winning teams will package the product as a risk-controllable decision, providing stakeholders with ready-made answers and a clear benefit/risk framework. Just by asking, you can find out for whom to tailor your packaging, and then identify a seemingly safe yet reassuring path to "agreement."

Consulting Firms

Many times, new technologies pass through an intermediary before reaching enterprise buyers. Consulting firms, system integrators, auditors, and other third parties often play a key role in the transformation and legitimization of new technologies. Whether you like it or not, they have become the gatekeepers of new technologies. They use established, familiar frameworks and collaborative models to transform new solutions into concepts people understand, turning uncertainty into actionable recommendations.

Founders often feel frustrated or skeptical about this, believing that consulting firms slow down progress, add unnecessary processes, and serve as additional stakeholders influencing final decisions. They indeed do! But founders must be realistic: in the U.S. alone, the management consulting service market is expected to exceed 130 billion dollars by 2026, most of which comes from large enterprises seeking assistance with strategy, risk, and transformation. Though blockchain-related business makes up only a small portion, do not assume that just saying "blockchain" will allow you to bypass this decision-making system.

Like it or not, this model has influenced enterprise decision-making for decades. Even if you are selling a blockchain solution, this logic will not disappear. Our experience communicating with Fortune 500 companies, large banks, and asset management institutions repeatedly proves that overlooking this layer can lead to strategic errors.

The collaboration between Deloitte and Digital Asset is a typical example: by working with large consulting firms like Deloitte, Digital Asset’s blockchain infrastructure was re-packaged into terms more familiar to enterprises, such as governance, risk, and compliance. For institutional buyers, the involvement of trusted parties like Deloitte not only validated the technology but also clarified and substantiated the implementation path.

Do Not Use the Same Script

Due to enterprise decision-makers' extreme sensitivity to their own needs (especially downside risks), you must customize your presentations: do not use the same sales script, the same PPT, or the same framework for every potential client.

Details matter. Two large banks may appear very similar on the surface, but their systems, constraints, and internal priorities can differ drastically. What impresses one may be completely ineffective for the other.

A generic script tells the other party: you did not take the time to understand this institution's specific project definitions. If your pitch is not tailor-made, it becomes hard for institutions to believe that your solution can fit perfectly.

Another serious error is the rhetoric of "starting over." In the crypto space, founders often tend to envision a completely new future: entirely replacing existing systems with newer, better decentralized technologies to usher in a new era. However, enterprises rarely do this; traditional infrastructure is deeply embedded within workflows, compliance procedures, existing supplier contracts, reporting systems, and countless touchpoints and stakeholders. Starting over disrupts daily operations and introduces various risks.

The broader the scope of change, the less anyone within the organization dares to make a decision: the larger the decision, the larger the coalition of decision-makers.

The successful cases we have seen involve founders first adapting to the current state of enterprise customers, rather than requiring customers to adapt to their ideals. When designing entry points, it is essential to integrate into existing systems and workflows, minimizing disruptions, and establishing reliable entry points.

A recent example is the collaboration between Uniswap and BlackRock on tokenized funds. Uniswap did not position DeFi as a replacement for traditional asset management but provided permissionless secondary market liquidity for products launched by BlackRock under existing regulatory and fund structures. This integration does not require BlackRock to abandon its operational model; it merely extends it onto the blockchain.

Once you have passed the procurement process and the solution is officially launched, then pursuing more grandiose goals can come later.

Enterprises Hedge Their Bets, You Must Become Their “Correct Hedge”

This risk aversion manifests as predictable behavior: institutions will hedge their positions and often at a large scale.

Large enterprises do not go all-in on emerging infrastructure; instead, they conduct multiple experiments simultaneously. Allocating small budgets to several suppliers, testing various solutions in innovative departments, or piloting without disturbing core systems. From the institution's perspective, this retains options while limiting risk exposure.

But for founders, there's a subtle trap here: being chosen does not equal being adopted. Many crypto companies are just one of the options for enterprises to test the waters; pilot programs may be okay, but there’s no need to scale.

The real goal is not to win a pilot but to become the hedge with the highest likelihood of success. This requires not only technological superiority but also professionalism.

Why Professionalism Trumps Purity

In such markets, clarity, predictability, and trustworthiness often outweigh pure innovation: it is hard to win solely with technology. For this reason, professionalism is crucial as it reduces uncertainty.

What we mean by professionalism is: when designing and presenting products, one must fully consider institutional realities (such as legal constraints, governance processes, and existing systems) and strive to operate within these realistic frameworks. Adhering to conventions tells others: this product is governable, auditable, and controllable. Regardless of whether this aligns with blockchain or crypto spirit, this is how enterprises perceive technology implementation.

This may seem like corporate resistance to change, but in fact, it is a rational response to the incentives of organizations.

Getting caught up in the ideological purity behind technology, whether “decentralized,” “minimum trust,” or other crypto spirits, is unlikely to persuade institutions constrained by law, regulation, and reputation. Demanding that enterprises accept a “complete vision” of the product all at once is overreaching and premature.

Of course, there are also examples of breakthrough technology + ideological purity achieving a win-win. LayerZero recently launched the new public chain Zero, attempting to solve scaling and interoperability challenges in enterprise implementation while retaining the core principles of decentralization and permissionless innovation.

However, Zero’s real differentiation lies not just in architecture but in its institutional design approach. It did not create a one-size-fits-all network and expect enterprises to adapt; instead, it collaborated with core partners to design dedicated “Zones” for specific scenarios like payments, settlements, and capital markets.

The Zero architecture, the willingness of the team to genuinely collaborate around these application scenarios, and LayerZero’s brand all significantly reduce some concerns of large traditional financial institutions. These factors combined have led institutions like Citadel, DTCC, and ICE to announce partnerships.

Founders often easily misinterpret enterprise resistance as conservatism, bureaucracy, or lack of vision. Sometimes this is the case, but more often there is another layer of reasoning: most institutions are not irrational; their goal is to maintain operations. Their design goals are to preserve capital, protect reputation, and withstand scrutiny.

Technologies that win in this environment are not necessarily the most elegant or ideologically pure, but those that strive to adapt to the realities of enterprises.

These realities can help illuminate the long-term potential of blockchain infrastructure in the enterprise domain.

Enterprise transformations rarely happen overnight. Look at the "digital transformation" of the 2010s: although the related technologies have existed for many years, most large enterprises are still modernizing their core systems and often having to spend vast sums hiring consulting firms. Large-scale digital transformation is a gradual process that requires controlled integration and scaling based on mature use cases rather than an overnight complete replacement. This is the reality of enterprise transformation.

Successful founders are not the ones who demand a complete vision from the start but those who understand how to implement progressively.

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