At the Converge22 conference in San Francisco, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of stablecoin issuer Circle, said that the world is finally moving from the speculative value phase of crypto to the utility phase. Drawing parallels to the early days of the internet, he said:
โIt is an architecture that the internet was founded on many decades ago โ this idea of open networks, of open standards and protocols, of connecting entities, devices and people in interoperable ways, of a globally intertwined world of decentralized systems.โ
As told by Allaire, there are currently on-chain mechanisms to ensure safe, trustworthy interactions between crypto users. However, there need to be โadvancementsโ in technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs that prove identities and credentials while simultaneously ensuring individualsโ privacy:
โPeople need to be able to interact with apps, and services, and content and transactions without knowing that theyโre using crypto. I donโt know Iโm using SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] when I send an email with Gmail โ I do know that, but a lot of people donโt know that, and thatโs okay.โ
Allaire explained that for mass crypto adoption to happen, participants would need to be introduced to a much more simplified version of the underlying technology. โPeople donโt need to know what chain theyโre on or even what stablecoin theyโre using,โ he said. โThey just need to know that itโs frictionless interaction with data and money.โ
Finally, Allaire said we are reaching the next โbroadbandโ phase of blockchain, referencing the dial-up era in the early days of the internet. โWe need safe, scalable and energy-efficient public blockchainsโ just as we did with the internet, he stated, raising the example of new developments such as Ethereumโs recent move to proof-of-stake and the emergence of layer-2 and layer-1 scaling models. He said the step was โnecessary for this [blockchain] to become something that is used by everyday society for mission-critical applications.โ
