Original author: Joe Zhou, Foresight News

1

One billion monthly active users is a technical boundary rarely discussed outside of the internet industry, but it is extremely important.

Below this line, a product is merely a tool; crossing this line, it gradually becomes infrastructure.

When a technology becomes infrastructure, it begins to influence the ways civilization operates. For example: Facebook changed the way social mobilization occurs; Amazon changed the model of product transactions; TikTok changed the structure of the entertainment industry.

One billion monthly active users means: this system has embedded itself into the daily workings of human society, and it serves as an invisible boundary for measuring whether a technology truly changes the structure of civilization.

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If looking solely at user scale, today’s Crypto is roughly equivalent to the internet in 2002.

In 1993, the global internet users were about 5 million. By 2002, this number had grown to about 500 million.

A similar pace has also appeared in the Crypto world: in 2017, the global Crypto users were about 5 million; by 2026, global Crypto users will have crossed the 500 million threshold.

From 5 million to 500 million, a 100-fold growth, both eras took about ten years.

History sometimes acts like a slow but precise metronome.

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On many levels, Crypto in 2026 is somewhat analogous to the internet in 2002.

The internet in 2002 spawned many models, but it had just experienced the internet bubble; people believed that the internet might have value, but generally did not believe it could flourish in many fields. At that time, not many believed that sectors like video, advertising, gaming, takeout, and ride-hailing could even surpass 100 million users.

Because smart phones had not yet appeared (without GPS and real-time positioning). The iPhone was only officially born in 2007. Rational brains could not imagine a non-linear internet future.

In 2002, there were actually very few products in the global internet that had a user base exceeding 100 million, such as Yahoo, ICQ, Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and AOL. They shared a notable common feature: they were almost all email or instant messaging products.

If we move the time to the Crypto world in 2026, there are also not many products with a user base exceeding 100 million, roughly including: Binance, Coinbase, Tether, USDC, OKX, Bitget, etc.

They also share a strong commonality: they are almost all exchanges or stablecoin networks. Meanwhile, most of the other narratives and sectors in Crypto still struggle near the scaling slaughter line.

This has led many to begin to doubt: Can Crypto truly reach the masses, or will it be limited to finance and payments?

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But among everyone, there is one person who has maintained rare optimism.

He is Marc Andreessen—one of the developers of the NCSA Mosaic browser. This browser rapidly transformed the internet from a high-threshold scientific network with only 1 million users to a scale of 20 million users within two years. He also almost predicted the rise of the entire internet for the following twenty years.

Thirty years later, this founder of a16z firmly believes: Crypto will ultimately become the infrastructure of the next generation of the internet.

To this end, over the past nearly ten years, a16z has raised nearly $10 billion in dedicated Crypto funds. And in 2026, he stepped in again—to raise about $2 billion for a new Crypto fund.

While most are still in doubt, he chooses to continue to double down on "the next internet."

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The real turning point of technology diffusion does not just come from the technology itself, but from user experience—which is the reduction of barriers.

In 1993, the NCSA Mosaic browser was born.

Before this, the internet was primarily a network used by research institutions and universities, requiring command lines, FTP, or Telnet operations. To ordinary people, this was almost an incomprehensible system.

Mosaic integrated images, text, and hyperlinks into a clickable graphical interface for the first time. The internet transformed from a set of technical protocols into a web world that ordinary people could browse. In the following two years, internet users began to grow explosively: from about 1 million users in 1992 to around 20 million in 1994.

The change in experience opened the floodgates for technology diffusion.

The turning point for Crypto also appeared at a similar moment—in 2017 and around. At this point, the crypto world had completed its geek experiment stage and was evolving into a viable financial network. What drove this leap was also a breakthrough at the experiential level:

• Binance made trading efficient and globally liquid
• Tether's USDT provided a stable unit of account
• Ethereum made smart contracts programmable financial infrastructure

Crypto transitioned from "digital asset experimentation" to a globally operational financial system. Thus, 2017 became the starting point for the first large-scale expansion of the crypto world: user numbers, trading volume, and stablecoin size all grew dozens or even hundreds of times in a short period.

That year (2017-2018), the infrastructure of Crypto began to explode.

Binance's user scale grew from 1 million to 10 million, expanding tenfold in a year.

Meanwhile, Tether (USDT) saw its market value soar from about $10 million at the beginning of the year to $1 billion by year-end, an entire 100-fold growth.

The combination of exchanges and stablecoins provided Crypto with its first truly usable global liquidity market.

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In 2007, the internet encountered an unexpected accelerator: the iPhone.

Phone + internet enabled the internet to truly enter the mobile era. Everyone now has a computer in their pocket that is always connected. The internet is no longer just a "tool used while sitting at a computer," but has become a constantly present infrastructure. User growth thus underwent a qualitative change: from relatively linear diffusion to exponential growth.

In the following years, a series of billion-user products emerged: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, PayPal, Amazon, WeChat, Alipay.

Today, in the world of Crypto, a similar ultimate accelerator is emerging: AI Agent.

When AI autonomously executes tasks in the network, they require a new foundational capability: 24/7 automated settlement—for purchasing computational power, paying for API services, subscribing to data, and collaborating and trading with other AIs.

What Crypto provides is precisely a globally available, permissionless, 24/7 operational native digital currency system. If future AI Agents need to autonomously trade and collaborate, then Crypto must become their settlement layer.

Economically autonomous AI Agents represent truly independent AIs, the true AGIs.

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So, what kind of application will have 1 billion users?

The answer is actually quite simple: it must solve real needs for the 1 billion people who exist every month. For example—cross-border payments.

The internet enables people to connect across geographical boundaries, but value remains divided by national borders. In the real world and digital world, more than 1 billion people engage in cross-border interactions every day: travel, business cooperation, online content tipping, and digital service transactions.

Information has long been globalized, but money still stays within national borders.

Crypto, precisely, is a system born to thoroughly unblock this scenario.

Another possible path to a billion users comes from RWA (real-world assets on-chain).

In the traditional financial system, the threshold for cross-border asset investment is extremely high. Complex legal structures, geographical restrictions, and high capital requirements exclude the vast majority of ordinary people from global assets.

But in a on-chain world, this structure may be rewritten. An Egyptian, a Chinese, and an American can completely co-own the income rights for a suite at The Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong or Chiang Mai for the next ten years.

Assets are split, tokenized, and freely circulate globally. When global assets begin to be globally held, the financial system will enter a new phase.

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The path for Crypto to reach a billion users may be far more than the two mentioned above. It may not be two types, but ten, or even dozens.

The most disruptive possibility may be the AI Agent economic system mentioned earlier.

If a billion AI Agents emerge in the future, these programs that can automatically execute payments and purchases, they would fundamentally not be able to operate relying on traditional banking systems that require KYC and have limited business hours. Crypto is currently the only native machine currency system.

Therefore, at some future stage, people might define: Only AI Agents that possess a Crypto account and have economic autonomy are true AIs, and they will be treated as independent economic entities like humans.

This path is very reminiscent of the mobile internet revolution of yesteryear: Mobile internet not only encouraged more people to go online, but also allowed countless mobile devices to become network nodes.

In the future, every AI Agent will become a native, active non-human user in the Crypto network.

Each AI Agent is an independent economic node.

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When the first Crypto product with 1 billion monthly active users appears, a new era may truly begin.

In the first twenty years after the birth of the internet, it was always in a stage of accumulating infrastructure and user scale. In 1993, the global internet users were only about 5 million. By 2002, internet users had surpassed 500 million—this moment is very similar to today's Crypto world.

In another ten years, by 2012, Facebook became the first platform in internet history to surpass 1 billion monthly active users. After that, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok emerged densely. More than twenty billion-level applications were concentratedly born in the following decade, unfolding a magnificent global interconnected era.

So the question arises: Will Crypto also迎来 a similar moment around 2036?

When the first Crypto product with a billion users appears, it may signify not just the success of an application, but the ultimate transformation of Crypto from a geek technology to a global infrastructure.

But before that, we must ask a more fundamental question: What significant-scale problems has Crypto really solved?

Only when a technology addresses the real needs of a billion people will the era of a billion users truly arrive.

10

There is an interesting rule in the history of technology: Technologies that truly change the world are rarely understood at their inception.

The internet was like this. Crypto may likely be so as well.

For twenty years after its birth, the internet was accompanied by a great deal of doubt and even long-term stigmatization. Online gaming was considered to ruin the younger generation; online videos were thought to be unprofitable; online shopping was considered synonymous with counterfeit goods; "free internet" was regarded as a scam...

Just like Crypto at this moment.

Real mass-user products often arise from the most ridiculed fringe areas.

Perhaps one day, when yet another application with a billion monthly active users emerges, people will realize: This system has actually been quietly operating for many years.

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