Author: Jesse Walden, Co-founder of Variant Fund; Translation: Golden Finance xiaozou

Eventually, crypto will become invisible — serving only as the underlying driving technology for the products and services we use every day. Some stablecoins are powering fintech applications, and wallet-as-a-service (WaaS) providers are abstracting crypto, which gives us a sense that this will be the way crypto works.

But today, crypto is more than just the underlying plumbing. For many people who are developing and building crypto, crypto is also the reason for their development.

Why? That is, "Why" do you enter the crypto field? There are countless answers, and there are many different cultures in the crypto field: Libertarians are most concerned about economic freedom; cooperative organizations are most concerned about fairness; cypherpunks are concerned about censorship; technical experts are concerned about licensing issues; community members are most concerned about fun, profit and resistance to authority; amateur airdrop farmers want to get a piece of the pie. These cultures about "why" are the dominant force driving the crypto field forward today.

One question that is always worth noting is where we are in the evolution from “Why” to “How”. For most projects I am involved in, I am still focused on “Why”. We are still in the early stages, and tapping into the true motivations of users is usually the best strategy to build a small hardcore user base.

Over the years, we’ve seen mainstream culture adopt elements of crypto culture, and crypto culture move closer to mainstream culture. The Bitcoin ETF is a great example of this: when we meet somewhere in the middle, the pie gets the biggest.

As Steve Jobs said about the first iPhone, users’ “thumbs learn” new technologies, so I think the most interesting opportunity lies not in abstracting crypto away entirely, but in focusing on making new crypto-native experiences accessible in the most intuitive way possible.