Crypto Compendium - Part XIV - What Comes Next

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Anything stated in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Triton may maintain positions in any of the assets or projects discussed on this website.

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TL;DR

• Crypto has matured into a real financial system with on-chain cash flows and growing institutional adoption.
• Stablecoins now power trillions in transactions and are being integrated by major banks and payment networks.
• High-performance blockchains and DeFi tools enable anyone to build advanced financial products.
• Regulatory clarity is near, with upcoming U.S. laws expected to unlock broader institutional participation.
• Blockchain is still early-stage, with potential similar to the internet’s rise in the 1990s.

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Crypto Compendium – Part XIV – What Comes Next?

We’ve covered quite a bit of ground over the past few months with this series, and for those that have followed along with each post, we thank you for your continued attention. What began as a theoretical exploration of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper evolved into a fairly panoramic survey of a very real revolution taking place in financial technologies. Over these now-fourteen segments, we’ve tried to elucidate blockchain’s transformation from a theoretical way to minimize frictions in online payments to an incredibly dynamic marketplace of programmable value, privacy advances, innovation and real on-chain, investable cash flows.

In our earliest chapters, we explained the very practical reasons for crypto’s invention in the context of the status quo of finance: slow settlement, opaque bookkeeping, and a complete overreliance on third party intermediaries despite living in an internet-first age. Enter Bitcoin in 2008, a novel experiment in cryptography and game theory that not only asked us to trust math over messengers, but finally gave us the technology to do so at internet scale. Importantly, rather than some immaculate conception out of nowhere, we stressed that Bitcoin is the result of many years of failed attempts at creating internet-native value systems, following the same path of any technological development. It just happened to be the first to truly succeed. 

We explained why the intentional design of Bitcoin - 21 million coins, programmatic reductions in inflation, open-source code and incredible game theory – positions it as a neutral non-sovereign asset that can act as a store of value in times of financial strife; that is, act as digital gold. And that genesis served to set the tone for what we covered later: Bitcoin was never really about fringe ideology, but about offering individuals around the world an alternative to the financial status quo that has never before existed. As we see growing concern over the US debt situation, warning signals arising in global capital markets (i.e. Japan), broadening international trade conflicts, and a race by sovereign banks to acquire more gold, more investors around the world are starting to view Bitcoin as one of the best escape hatches from our current financial constructs. The fact that Bitcoin continues to reach new all-time highs against this backdrop speaks volumes. 

We then turned our view towards the advancements that have followed Bitcoin’s invention, with deep dives into smart contracts, applied cryptography and rival layer-1 networks. Ethereum, with its Turing-complete compute environment, provided us with the novel ability of decentralized on-chain programmable value, even if the network remains relatively slow and frequently priced out users in its earliest days. But those frictions opened the door for Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism and other high-performance networks to compete, and despite their incredible advancements, we have stressed that we are still in the early stages of development for this industry. There are still fundamental issues that need to be solved before crypto is truly ready for primetime, but every day there continues to be advancements that move the technology forward in tremendous ways. 

The relative dearth of practical applications and user-friendly experiences is still a major pain point to be addressed. But we are right on the cusp of this technology exploding into mainstream adoption. Individuals all over the world that have long been the lifeblood of crypto are now being joined by companies, pension funds and even sovereign governments in owning Bitcoin and using blockchain technology to improve financial systems. Regulatory clarity continues to increase with an undeniable arc towards a further embrace of crypto, including the imminent passing of two landmark bills in the US covering stablecoins and crypto market structure. These are likely the two largest remaining hurdles to clear before traditional financial institutions are able and willing to embrace crypto fully. And we are right at that tipping point now. 

We devoted an entire segment to stablecoins because it is increasingly clear that they represent one of the most game-changing advancements in financial technology in decades. Without drama or fanfare – and truthfully in the face of active opposition that still exists today - stablecoins have grown to a $250 billion dollar technology that is already transforming payments, lending, and liquidity provision and are actively being adopted by payment giants such as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Paypal. Some of the biggest banks in the world (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) recently announced an intention to jointly launched a stablecoin project; they just need the green light from regulators. A fully programmable digital dollar that is available 24/7, self-custodied, permissionless and globally transmissible with near-instant finality and essentially free to transact? That is real utility, full stop. And as the likes of USDC and USDT continue to pipe trillions in volumes natively across the internet, they quietly underscore blockchain’s most practical promise: programmable settlement rails that operate around the clock and around the world.

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We also looked ahead to quantum computers as one of the most oft-cited threats to blockchain technology. In truth, they do present a tangible threat to ECDSA encryption and thus one of the most core components of blockchain security. But thankfully, the conversation around post-quantum cryptography and network hard forks is already well underway with many ecosystems already taking steps to get in front of any threats. The technological piece will be relatively easy to solve; it is the social piece that remains the bigger wild card. And here, one needs to trust that the ecosystems and communities that have gotten crypto to where it is today will protect and evolve the networks to be resistant against future threats. It is up for each investor to decide if the theoretical risk of unproven technology outweighs the proven capabilities of the global crypto community that literally now have trillions at stake to protect.

At the heart of what makes programmable value truly unique lies composability and interoperability: the magic of money legos. We illustrated how novel mechanisms like yield-stripping, perpetual swaps, and synthetic collateral can be pieced together into complex strategies that to this point were available only to the most well-connected financial actors but are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection at the click of a mouse. This is where the chaos of crypto and DeFi transcends niche curiosities and circular games and becomes a financial engineer’s dream, enabling anyone to develop financial primitives that were previously the exclusive domain of legacy institutions and deep-pocketed investors. Since the invention of the internet, software has fundamentally changed how we interact with the world purely based on how we move information. Imagine what we can do now that we can extend that functionality to value itself. 

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Finally, we grounded our series in tangible, real cash flows to answer the question: what is the intrinsic value of any of this? Specifically, we demonstrated how tokens now absolutely represent direct exposure to investable crypto-native businesses. We provided examples of just four protocols that collectively drive hundreds of millions of quarterly cash flows to token holders, with no equity operating companies in sight. It is still very true that there are a high number of scams and absurdly overvalued tokens on the market, but these are increasingly pushed to the fringes and recognized for what they are. This will only continue as more and more professional capital enters the market through liquid funds like Triton. 

So, as we close out this Compendium series, we leave the reader with three observations to consider going forward:

1. Convergence of TradFi and DeFi
   As development continues in crypto and regulation clarifies, expect continued convergence between on-chain and off-chain assets and a blurring of the line that separates the two today. As tokenized securities, bonds, and even real estate find distribution through DeFi rails, the financial world will meld into a global, unified, programmable marketplace. Expect to see tokenized treasuries, on-chain credit default swaps, and corporate bonds, each powered by the same primitives that today underlie 100x leveraged memecoin trading. When some of the most respected companies in the world – Blackrock, McKinsey, BCG, Fidelity, Apollo, Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, Van Eck, Blackstone, KKR, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Robinhood, Wells Fargo, Cantor Fitzgerald and Citi, to name just a few – are all either already building on permissionless blockchains or actively looking to do so, one has to think that the multi-trillion dollar targets that many have floated for stablecoins and tokenized assets may in fact still be severely underestimating where crypto is ultimately headed. 
2. Yield Over Narrative
   For the past decade, the oft-voiced trope that there is no real intrinsic value to any of these assets was arguably true. But one cannot stress strongly enough that that is no longer the case in 2025. And as the industry continues to mature, the market will increasingly create and reward protocols that deliver real, transparent value to their communities and token holders. Flashy narratives, viral tweet storms and memecoins will continue to have their place given the internet-native nature of the industry, but in a maturing investing climate, the projects with clear, documented cash flows will increasingly outperform. Bitcoin has led the way on the back of some of the most positive headlines one could possibly imagine (e.g. the US Government creating a strategic Bitcoin Reserve), and as a result has been the strongest performing asset in the world. But with further regulatory clarity and an embrace by politicians, companies and investors alike, we very well may be on the cusp of a breakout in crypto-native protocol adoption and investors will be rewarded for being early. And amazingly, we are still very early – the median investor still has 0% of their portfolio in crypto, after all. 
3. The Long-Term Implications of Programmable Value
   We may sound like a broken record with this one, but that is by intention. We ask you to step back and think about how paradigm-transforming the internet has been simply because it allowed information, for the first time, to be truly open, permissionless and globally accessible. When it was first invented, the value of that power was not clear – there were Nobel Laureates saying it would be no more impactful than the fax machine, after all. We are right at that same place now with how blockchain technology and crypto are viewed. The early adopters and believers (like us at Triton) will not shut up about how amazing the technology is, while the majority of people around the world are at best agnostic or unaware, or more likely, highly skeptical. To us as investors that screams opportunity, and the parallels to the early internet are too hard to ignore. So, as we have said numerous times throughout these posts: consider what the internet has unlocked simply by changing how we move information and then try to imagine what can happen once we apply that to actual value. This technology is still very young, as in, early 1990s-young. And as a reminder, this is where the internet was at that same point after ‘two decades’ of consumer use in 1995:

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Makes one wonder. 

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Part XV is yet to be written

This series has been both an intellectual overview and a practical deep dive. Yet, if there is one takeaway from these fourteen segments, it’s that blockchain’s story is far from finished. Each new protocol, each governance proposal, and each breakthrough in cryptography adds another chapter to this dynamic and volatile odyssey. 

In closing, we hope this series has served to help the reader better understand where we have come from, where we are today, and most importantly, provide the context to start imagining where this technology will take us in the future. From trustless consensus through atomic composability to mature, cash-flowing projects and ecosystems, the arc towards adoption and value creation is undeniable. But the final chapters remain unwritten. And if the last decade of crypto has taught us anything, it’s that innovation in the space is less about predicting the future and more about building it, one block at a time.

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