The current capital market structure, with its high fees, delays, and limited access, is a direct result of regulations from the 1930s. These laws created layers of intermediaries to enforce trust, baking in complexity and rent-seeking by design. This historical context explains why the system is ripe for disruption by more efficient technologies.

Crypto's primary advantage is its ability to automate processes that rely on expensive human-based trust (brokers, lawyers) with software and cryptography, which offer mathematical guarantees at a fraction of the cost.

Blockchain's disruption will not impact all of finance equally. Trading firms are safe because market making is a fundamental need. However, intermediaries like banks, exchanges, and custodians face an existential threat as their core function—managing ledgers and access—is directly replaced by blockchain's "private key and a ledger" infrastructure.

As AI agents become sophisticated, they'll need to pay for services. Traditional banking is too slow and fragmented for them. Crypto, as the internet's native money, provides the instant, global, low-fee rails for AI agents to transact with each other and with web services, creating a major new use case.

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.

The proliferation of local crypto exchanges in emerging markets has created robust, stablecoin-dominated trading environments. These function as highly efficient, alternative foreign exchange markets, enabling faster and cheaper cross-border value transfer than traditional rails.

The immediate value for crypto is lower in the US, where traditional finance offers decent consumer protection. In countries with less reliable banking systems, crypto provides a much larger, more immediate leap in security and efficiency, accelerating its adoption.

After years of exploring various use cases, crypto's clearest product-market fit is as a new version of the financial system. The success of stablecoins, prediction markets, and decentralized trading platforms demonstrates that financial applications are where crypto currently has the strongest, most undeniable traction.

For AI agents to be truly autonomous and valuable, they must participate in the economy. Traditional finance is built for humans. Crypto provides the missing infrastructure: internet-native money, a way for AI to have a verifiable identity, and a trustless system for proving provenance, making it the essential economic network for AI.