Is crypto just finance?

There’s a version of this debate that resurfaces every cycle, but it feels sharper right now.

One side argues that the experiment is over. Crypto has had nearly two decades to prove itself. The only categories that have worked at scale are financial: store of value, stablecoins, DeFi, tokenized assets, capital formation. Everything else — gaming, media, decentralized social, “read–write–own” — absorbed capital, attention, and talent, and then quietly failed to stick.

The other side pushes back. Of course finance came first. Of course money was the first product-market fit. Blockchains introduce a new coordination primitive — ownership embedded into internet-scale systems — and finance is the most obvious proving ground for that primitive. Infrastructure and distribution come first, and then new categories follow later.

Here’s an example of what those arguments look and sound like most recently.

The finance-only case

The “crypto is finance” thesis is hard to dismiss if you look at the timeline honestly.

Bitcoin: non-sovereign store of value.
Tether: stablecoins.
Ethereum: programmable money.
ICOs: capital formation.
DeFi: financial protocols by design.
RWAs: tokenized financial assets.

Even NFTs, at their peak, functioned primarily as speculative financial instruments.

Meanwhile, crypto-native gaming and decentralized media platforms never achieved comparable traction. Enormous capital was deployed in those directions and so far the outcomes are underwhelming.

From this perspective, the conclusion is straightforward: crypto’s comparative advantage is financial coordination. Everything else was narrative overreach.

It’s worth noting that even if the crypto-as-finance use case is the dominant innovation, it’s still a big deal.

Finance is nearly 10% of global GDP. Banks continually rank among the lowest in customer satisfaction. The legacy financial stack is slow, closed, and unevenly distributed. If crypto only upgrades the front end and back end of finance, that alone is generational.

The coordination-primitive case

The read-write-own argument doesn’t deny the financial dominance, but it also frames the financial aspect as more of an onboarding mechanism.

Blockchains introduce a new primitive: programmable ownership embedded directly into internet-native coordination systems. Finance emerges first because it is universal, incentive-aligned, and measurable. The internet money use case is the cleanest place for that primitive to prove itself.

Along the way, the adoption of onchain finance also bootstraps:

• wallets
• identity
• liquidity
• distribution
• onchain trust

Only after hundreds of millions of people are onchain for financial reasons do new cultural and economic categories have a real chance to emerge.

The analogy to the early internet is not accidental. The internet did not begin with streaming or social networks. It began with connectivity and packet switching. Entirely new categories emerged only after infrastructure was sufficiently distributed and normalized.

The internet went through several eras before achieving the ubiquity we know today. Viewed this way, with a greater sense of history and scale, DeFi and onchain finance are just the latest era — like the social internet or the mobile internet that preceded the current wave of adoption.

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The uncomfortable middle

The tension between these views often becomes emotional. Either Web3 is inevitable, or it was cope. Either regulation held back consumer use cases, or those use cases simply lacked demand.

But the disagreement may be about layers rather than outcomes.

Open Money deliberately lives in the middle.

The Money part accepts the empirical record: crypto’s dominant, durable, large-scale adoption (so far) has been financial.

The Open part asks what changes once finance runs on open, permissionless, programmable, composable rails.

When money becomes:

• non-custodial by default
• programmable at the base layer
• interoperable across applications
• tied to persistent wallet identities

It will no longer function like money previously functioned.

Instead, it becomes a new kind of rail system that can’t stay confined to “finance.” These attributes enable money to move and be used in new contexts that can scale at different resolutions — both widespread and global.

Financial behavior shapes digital behavior. Once users hold assets directly, manage keys, sign transactions, and participate in token-governed systems, they are not just using new financial tools. They are operating inside a different coordination model.

This doesn’t exactly mean that all financial apps will be running on a blockchain, but it will change how digital ownership works and how we move value.

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What failure actually tells us

It’s possible that many early non-financial crypto applications were simply bad products. Maybe they were too early. After all, markets reject things, capital misallocates, and narratives can be short-lived.

It’s also possible that some categories were premature. Many assumed wallet-native identity, frictionless onboarding, deep liquidity, and normalized token trust before those conditions existed at scale.

Both explanations can be true at the same time.

The mistake would be declaring that because finance proved product-market fit first, it exhausts the possibility space. The opposite mistake would be assuming that read–write–own is inevitable simply because it is philosophically appealing.

Crypto’s history shows one consistent pattern: financial primitives scale first. They build the user base, liquidity, and distribution rails. Everything else is downstream of that.

The open question is not whether crypto is financial. It clearly is.

The open question is whether open financial infrastructure remains self-contained.

Research backlog

This debate surfaces useful questions worth tracking deliberately:

• At what point does financial adoption create durable non-financial behaviors?
• Does wallet-native identity meaningfully change digital coordination outside trading contexts?
• Are non-financial Web3 failures evidence of category error, or simply premature timing?
• What measurable signals would indicate that open rails are spilling into adjacent domains?
• If crypto remains primarily financial, what would true saturation look like?

Closing thought

Crypto may ultimately be “just finance.”

If that’s true, it is already one of the largest technological shifts of the last two decades.

But if open financial rails quietly reshape how identity, coordination, and ownership function online, the story may look different in hindsight.

Finance is clearly the first chapter.

Whether it is the whole book is still unresolved.

If this debate resonates, reply with where you fall — finance-only, inevitable Web3, or somewhere in between.