--- title: "Crypto Is Ready To Be Boring Now" date: 2025-12-12 outlet: forbes originalUrl: "https://www.forbes.com/sites/christiancatalini/2025/12/12/crypto-is-ready-to-be-boring-now/" canonical: original rights: full tags: [stablecoins-payments, ai-agi] deck: "In the age of AI, money needs identity. How World and stablecoins are building the boring infrastructure to separate humans from bots and scale the economy." image: "/images/writing/crypto-ready-to-be-boring.jpg" --- If you have been watching the crypto space, you might have noticed that things are moving faster lately. Usually, that just means “numbers go up,” but this time the catalyst isn't a bull market or a new cryptographic breakthrough. It is simply that the rules are finally being written down. With stablecoin regulation falling into place, the handbrake is off. Projects are racing to move from “crypto for crypto people” to actual mainstream products, operating on the theory that if you aren't constantly worried about going to jail, you can be a lot more ambitious about building actual businesses. It turns out that when the building blocks are in place—and when stablecoins are a regulated business rather than a lingering existential threat—the definition of “ambitious” changes. You stop trying to reinvent the concept of money and start trying to make products that work. The [last mile frictions](https://hbr.org/2018/06/what-blockchain-cant-do) that constrained blockchains are finally disappearing, mostly because permissionless networks are finally doing the obvious, boring thing: admitting that the most useful thing you can do with a blockchain—at least for now—is connect it to a Visa card. ## The Anonymity Bug Payments was always going to be the first layer crypto had to clear. It is the basic primitive for everything else. Satoshi delivered almost all of the ingredients for an electronic cash system: a digital asset, a global ledger, and the incentives to run it. But for payments to safely scale, you need identity: because modern money is not just a measure of value, but a vector of intent that must be verified. This distinction is critical. Bitcoin brilliantly solved the double-spending problem—ensuring digital cash couldn’t be copy-pasted—but it didn't solve the identity problem. While some tout anonymity as a feature, for global adoption, it is a major bug. I learned this the hard way designing Libra. The first concession we had to make was on non-custodial wallets: we had clever ideas on how to make them safe, but regulators demanded a safe and contained perimeter from day one. Society has strong preferences that financial rails should not support illicit finance, and if your permissionless protocol keeps accidentally funding terrorism, society will eventually revoke its permission. ## The Stablecoin Sandwich The current state of crypto is a textbook example of “[infrastructure inversion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXIaILHl7Rg).” The theory is that eventually we will have fancy zero-knowledge proofs and onchain attestations that perfectly balance privacy and compliance. The reality is that, for now, we are just pasting the new technology onto the old one in the most boring way possible. Take the “[stablecoin sandwich](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christiancatalini/2025/04/29/the-stablecoin-wars/).” This is the industry term for bridging two otherwise disjointed real-time domestic payment systems by converting fiat to stablecoins, sending them across blockchain rails, and converting them back to fiat on the other side. It works, but the way it scales is ironic. It does not rely on the [openness of crypto networks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5sILotF4Jc). Businesses do not connect to the permissionless network themselves, that requires additional work. Instead, they hire an orchestration provider to do the compliance checks and talk to the blockchain for them. This is a far cry from controlling your own destiny, and it brings the intermediary right back into the picture. It turns out that blockchains solved *settlement*—moving the value—but they forgot to solve *information*. In the traditional financial system, every payment comes with a sidecar of data: who sent it, why, and whether they are on a sanctions list. If you cannot send that data, the ability to settle the payment in seconds is useless, because the bank on the other end is legally required to reject it. ## Human Money? So what might the future look like? Yesterday’s [World (formerly Worldcoin) event](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2eLyItnqys) in San Francisco offered one potential answer, and it involves [chrome spheres](https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/05/01/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-crypto-adoption/). Alex Blania and Sam Altman were on stage reminiscing about the old days, back when it wasn’t entirely obvious that AI would consume the internet. What was obvious to them was that being able to distinguish a human from a bot would eventually become the most useful commodity in the world. This quest for “[Proof of Personhood](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christiancatalini/2024/12/19/can-cryptos-scarcity-tame-ais-infinite-abundance/)” is what motivated Blania to build a custom hardware network to verify that users are, in fact, biological entities. After six years, the pieces are falling into place. What used to look like an awkward futuristic experiment—let’s scan everyone's irises—is starting to look less like a stunt and more like a utility. Altman referenced a quote from [Paul Buchheit](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/machine-money-and-people-money/) that sums up the stakes: "There may need to be two kinds of money: machine money, and human money." It turns out that Proof of Personhood is just the compliance function for the AI age. You need it to separate good actors from bad actors to scale payments, but in a world of infinite synthetic content, you need it to prove the only thing that is still scarce: that something was made by a person. For years, the dream of crypto has been to build a global Venmo on top of crypto primitives. Yesterday, World showcased a wallet that basically delivers that, though the primitives involved look a lot like traditional fintech plumbing. By integrating virtual bank accounts in 18 countries, a Visa card, and local payment rails, they have bridged the gap between crypto and reality. It turns out that what customers really need for global money movement isn’t a new token, it is just the ability to deposit a paycheck and swipe a Visa card. And the way to get them to do it is the classic tech growth model: World isn't charging fees for most of this. Partly this works because banks need to charge you rent, and World doesn't. But mostly it works because moving money should be cheap. To a bank, a wire transfer is a diplomatic mission involving three correspondent banks and a fax machine. To a blockchain, it is just updating a ledger entry. World is betting that the actual cost of money movement is effectively trending towards zero. ## App Store Arbitrage Moreover, it does not stop at payments. Back in 2024, I wrote about what could potentially be a [“killer app” for crypto](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christiancatalini/2024/02/19/is-cryptos-killer-app-finally-here/): Mini Apps. The prediction was that when they arrived, they would look “clunky, niche, and maybe even toy-like”. This sounds innocuous, or maybe just annoying, but the market structure implication is real. The point of Mini Apps isn't just to put a calculator in your X feed, it is to allow developers to distribute software without asking app stores for permission or paying a 30% tax. It turns out that escaping the walled garden is just code for keeping your own revenue. The most valuable feature a new ecosystem can offer developers is simply the ability to process payments without paying a toll to the landlord. The combination of mini apps and strong identity gives developers a range of new primitives, and implies a shift in World's strategy. In the past, the approach was scan your iris or get out, which is a bit prescriptive. The new approach is tiered, treating verified humanity as a premium feature. This makes sense as a market mechanism. Users might be hesitant to scan their biometrics for an abstract, future reward, but they will absolutely do it for extra basis points of yield. Or, perhaps, for love: the team showcased how Tinder users in Japan can use World ID for verification. It turns out that the killer app for sovereign identity is just proving to your date that you aren't a bot. If you doubt that users will trade their biometrics for convenience, you should ask the people scanning their eyes to skip the security line at SFO. ## Off the Record Blania clearly understands the platform paradox: you want top marketplaces, social networks, chatbots, and financial services to use World ID as a primitive, but they won't touch it until you have users. And you don't get users without a product. So you have to build the product yourself. This explains both the payments play, and the move into messaging. World is collaborating with Shane Mac’s team to integrate XMTP, a decentralized messaging protocol, directly into the app. This offers significant privacy advantages over centralized alternatives like Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram. It turns out that if you want to be the invisible identity layer for the internet, you may first have to showcase it by building a better version of messaging. Before the event started, Mac showed me his latest experiment, [Convos](https://convos.org/why). The app is also based on XMTP, suggesting that the interoperability pitch for crypto might actually extend beyond financial services to things normal people use, like messaging. Convos takes advantage of cryptography to deliver an experience without signups, phone numbers, history, or tracking. And, of course, it doesn’t rely on centralized servers. The pitch here is that this might be the first truly off-the-record messaging app. In a world where every Slack message and email is permanent, the ultimate luxury good is a conversation that actually disappears. I’d imagine the early adopters will be investigative journalists, but the broader promise is to restore private conversations as the default setting for human interaction, rather than a suspicious anomaly. Overall, while some of these experiments are early, the trajectory is clear. The infrastructure is finally catching up to the manifesto. Everything crypto enthusiasts envisioned a decade ago is slowly becoming boring enough to actually work, and it is happening just in time. With AI accelerating, the ability to cryptographically verify truth is no longer just a philosophical hobby for cypherpunks. It turns out to be the necessary plumbing for the entire digital economy.