Where are all the crypto use cases? | Evan Conrad

Three years ago, I felt crypto’s only proven use case was bitcoin as a store of value was the only clear, proven use case (it was clear that would endure and build retail and institutional value). Now, I see programmable money in Ethereum and Ethereum’s competitors as the next proven use case, with the massive influx into DeFi and NFTs a critical p... See more

Crypto has now evolved beyond bitcoin and its libertarian roots. With the rise of Ethereum and many other protocols, the focus is less on notions of private currencies and more on how the technology can be used for different applications. So while decentralisation remains an important component, the wider community is less maximalist about it and t... See more

In crypto’s early days, the low-hanging fruits were up for grabs. Ethereum didn’t need to think about every specific use case - it just needed to work.Uniswap and Aave didn’t need to predict the growth of DeFi, stablecoins, interest-bearing tokens etc. to know that trading and borrowing were foundational use cases.Opensea didn’t need to predict P2E... See more

I try to keep a relatively level head about crypto, and at least 90% of it is nonsense right now. Maybe more like 95-99%. 
But there are some real use cases right now that are quite good and provide a legitimate case for the value of blockchain tech.

we've yet to convince the public that crypto is more than just a "currency." In fact, most crypto isn't even a currency anyway — it's gas for a protocol, a utility for a specific ecosystem with no intent of ever being money.

Anyway, it’s a short list, right? Well, this is why crypto critics aren’t wrong when they talk about how “useless” crypto is. It doesn’t do very much right now, but these few things do show some hints at what might be coming later.

When I go to crypto conferences, I like asking people I meet “in the present state of crypto or blockchains, what applications do you think are solving real-world problems? Problems that if you abstracted the crypto part away (because people are not going to use a crypto product just because it’s “decentralized”, they want convenience and won’t set... See more