a16z crypto founder talks about the long-term game of cryptocurrency—great read. - Blockchain is currently in its financial era. - It was never about all crypto applications emerging at the same time (this is why many people say the web3 narrative is dead, but he argues the opposite. His point is that understanding comes in stages, just like building the mobile web in 1998—why was it so hard? Because the environment wasn’t ready. TikTok tried multiple times over 2-3 years in the video space before finally succeeding. It’s a similar logic—the environment wasn’t fertile for success). The first wave should be blockchain finance, from DeFi to stablecoins/payments to RWA. - Blockchain introduces a new primitive that can coordinate people and capital at internet scale, embedding ownership directly into the system. In the future, it may not only coordinate people and capital but also coordination between agents (Comment: x8004 is still one of the most important protocols). - Policy remains a missing piece, which has led to issues like rug pulls and wash trading. - Over the years, the industry has been flooded with scams and exploitative behavior, eroding users’ trust in tokens.