My Blockchain Thesis After Eight Months

When I started paying attention to blockchain earlier this year, I was sceptical but curious. The more I learned, the more my curiosity turned into conviction — not about prices, but about infrastructure.

Eight months later, here is the thesis I carry into 2018.

The Core Thesis

Blockchain will become the infrastructure layer for the next generation of financial systems.

Not all finance will move on-chain quickly. Traditional rails will persist for decades. But the frontier of new financial primitives — programmable money, tokenised assets, decentralised lending, global settlement — will increasingly be built on open protocols.

The tokens are the incentive mechanisms that make these protocols function. The long-term value will be captured by:

Protocols that achieve durable network effects
Applications that provide real utility
Infrastructure that bridges crypto to the real economy (identity, compliance, custody, stablecoins)

What I Believe Is Overhyped

Most ICOs: the capital formation mechanism is innovative; most projects are not.
Enterprise consortium chains: useful in narrow contexts, but they miss the compounding power of open networks.
Price narratives: they attract attention, but they distort priorities.

What I Believe Is Underrated

Stablecoins: the bridge between crypto and commerce.
Developer ecosystems: adoption follows builders.
Regulatory clarity: the difference between an experiment and an industry.
User experience: the technology will only win when it becomes invisible.

The Open Questions

I still don’t know:

Which smart contract platform will dominate long-term
How regulation will evolve across major jurisdictions
How privacy and compliance will be reconciled
Whether decentralised governance can scale without fragmentation

But uncertainty does not negate the direction. It simply defines the work.

The market will swing wildly. The infrastructure will keep being built. The job is to focus on what compounds.