Crypto is winning by transitioning into the global plumbing for digitized assets, moving past its subcultural origins to become the high-performance foundation for all financial value.
Chronological Deep Dives
The Death of Magical Thinking
- Gunter reflects on the 2018 period where blockchains were proposed for non-financial use cases like medical records or supply chain tracking.
- Blockchains exist specifically for the transfer and trade of digital assets.
- The "Mango on a blockchain" experiments failed because physical goods are not digitally native.
- Success requires assets to be tokenized before advanced onchain products become viable.
- Stablecoins represent the first successful implementation of this digitally native asset class.
“Suddenly all of these dream products that people have been thinking about and theorizing about in crypto for so long start to make sense.”
Speaker Attribution: Jill Gunter
The LLM Analogy for Tokenization
- Gunter compares the current state of crypto to the internet in 1994 to explain why certain products feel premature.
- Large Language Models (LLMs) required the entire internet to be digitized before they became functional.
- Crypto requires global assets like stocks and bonds to be tokenized before complex financial protocols can scale.
- The current bottleneck is the volume of onchain assets rather than the underlying technology.
- Tokenization acts as the prerequisite for sophisticated privacy and risk management tools.
“You needed all the information in the world to be digitized before the most powerful products could work. Now you need all the assets in the world to be tokenized.”
Speaker Attribution: Jill Gunter
The Infrastructure Moat
- The conversation explores the cyclical nature of value accrual between applications and infrastructure.
- Applications like Augur or CryptoKitties are often fungible and lack durable competitive advantages.
- Infrastructure providers capture value by controlling liquidity aggregation and the rails for asset movement.
- Successful applications often demand better infrastructure, which then enables a new category of products.
- Gunter argues that infrastructure remains the primary area for long-term value capture.
“The apps are so often replaceable or fungible and don't have really deep moats.”
Speaker Attribution: Jill Gunter
The SEC’s Policy Pivot and Privacy
- Gunter details her recent presentation at the SEC regarding the necessity of financial privacy in capital markets.
- The SEC has transitioned from a hostile "regulation by subpoena" methodology to active dialogue with builders.
- Financial privacy is a requirement for corporations to protect competitive strategies from rivals.
- Zero-Knowledge proofs (cryptographic methods to prove a statement is true without revealing the underlying data) enable compliance without exposing entire portfolios.
- The policy focus is moving away from strict consumer protection toward individual empowerment and civil liberties.
“If you are a large global bank you really care about privacy from your competitors so that you can build a competitive business.”
Speaker Attribution: Jill Gunter
Ethereum’s 2026 Identity Crisis
- Gunter predicts a reconciliation for Ethereum as it faces pressure from institutional entrants like Stripe and Sony.
- Ethereum must choose between prioritizing decentralization or performance metrics like fast finality.
- Fast finality (the speed at which a transaction becomes irreversible) is the primary requirement for payments and corporate chains.
- Modular solutions like Espresso provide speed as a service to teams building on top of Ethereum.
- The rise of "Corpo-Chains" (institutional L2s) forces infrastructure builders to prioritize reliability over ideological purity.
“Ethereum is going to be forced into another really tough reconciliation for itself about which way man.”
Speaker Attribution: Jill Gunter
Investor & Researcher Alpha
- The Performance Bottleneck: Corporate entrants like Stripe and Sony prioritize fast finality and uptime over decentralization. Capital is moving toward infrastructure that provides "Speed as a Service" to these institutional L2s.
- The Tokenization Prerequisite: Research into complex onchain derivatives or privacy tools is premature without a critical mass of tokenized real-world assets. The primary investment opportunity lies in the rails that facilitate this digitization.
- The Application Moat Problem: Onchain pioneers like PolyMarket open the design space, but hybrid competitors like Kelshi often capture the mass market. Investors should favor infrastructure that aggregates liquidity across these competing applications.
Strategic Conclusion
Crypto is shedding its identity as a niche subculture to become the pragmatic foundation for global finance. The industry must now prioritize performance and asset tokenization over ideological maximalism. The next step is the mass migration of traditional securities onto high-speed, private onchain rails.
