Contrary to belief, the crypto industry's primary need is not deregulation but clear, predictable rules. The ambiguous "regulation through enforcement" approach, where rules are defined via prosecution, creates uncertainty that drives innovation and capital offshore.

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.

Analysis of mobile wallet usage versus token-related web traffic reveals a stark geographical divide. Developing countries lead in on-chain activity, suggesting real-world use cases, whereas developed nations lead in trading interest, indicating a focus on speculation.

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.

Solana's mission is to create a global, decentralized exchange where information is priced in instantly, regardless of location. This would solve the physics problem of information latency (e.g., news traveling from Singapore to the NYSE), removing arbitrage windows that support many financial middlemen.

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.

Western teams often focus on technology, but the highest-volume users of real-world crypto applications like stablecoins and perpetuals are in Asia and Latin America. Their adoption patterns—not theories from New York or Silicon Valley—dictate which solutions ultimately succeed.

Solana's founder suggests the partisan split on crypto is less about ideology and more about age. Younger politicians grasp the technology's potential, while older incumbents see it as a disruptive threat to the established financial control systems they built.

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.