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Jeremy Allaire compares blockchain's evolution to the early internet. After more than a decade of foundational work and slow progress, the infrastructure is finally mature enough to be broadly useful—similar to how broadband unlocked the internet's true potential. The demands of the new "agentic economy" are providing the catalyst for this inflection point.
A complete shift of financial assets to blockchain is imminent. This won't happen on transparent chains like Ethereum, but on purpose-built networks like Canton. The key enabler is configurable privacy, a feature that allows financial institutions to transact without broadcasting their proprietary positions to the entire world.
Jeremy Allaire predicts that just as businesses moved online, they will now transition to being 'on-chain.' This means core corporate functions like contracts, governance, and financials will be executed by smart contracts and AI, fundamentally changing how corporations operate.
The recent explosion of stablecoins wasn't due to a new financial innovation, but the maturation of underlying blockchain infrastructure. Cheaper and faster transactions on Layer 2 solutions and improved Layer 1s finally made large-scale, low-cost payments practical for real-world use.
Major innovations often aren't about inventing new components, but about cleverly integrating existing, mature technologies into a unified product. This was true for Netscape's browser and Bitcoin, and will likely be true for the first successful network states, which will combine crypto, VR, and community platforms.
The last decade of crypto focused on moving assets like Bitcoin on-chain. The next, more significant mega-trend will be the migration of entire companies and their real-world revenue streams onto blockchains, involving both crypto-native firms and traditional giants like BlackRock and Stripe.
The slow development of consumer-facing crypto applications isn't a sign of failure, but a constraint of "block space"—the capacity for on-chain computation and storage. Just as low bandwidth throttled the early web to text-only sites, limited block space gates crypto apps to simpler financial transactions for now.
As AI makes digital content and transactions nearly free to create, trust evaporates. Crypto primitives like blockchains offer a solution by providing verifiable identity, provenance (chain of custody), and reliable on-chain data, which is crucial for both humans and AI agents to operate safely.
Blockchains have evolved like computer architecture. Bitcoin was a single-purpose, incentivized P2P network. Ethereum introduced programmability, akin to the shift to general-purpose computers (von Neumann architecture). The current era of L2s focuses on scalability and specialization.
Multicoin's central thesis is that crypto's ultimate purpose is creating "Internet Capital Markets"—the ability to trade any asset, from anywhere, 24/7, via any software. This broad vision of permissionless, programmable finance is seen as the most significant long-term impact of blockchain, destined to supersede more niche consumer applications or "Web3" concepts.
To overcome executive skepticism, HP's Bilal Kouider reframes blockchain not as a niche crypto trend but as the result of 40+ years of innovation originating from 1970s academic research. He points to its current scale—processing over $28 trillion annually, more than Visa, Mastercard, and Amex combined—to establish its enterprise-grade credibility.