Why Crypto’s Road To Mass Adoption Is Longer—And More Transformative—Than AI’s

Eli Ben-Sasson, the founding scientist behind the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash and CEO of blockchain technology firm StarkWare, recently offered his perspective on the evolving landscape of digital assets. In a post on the social media platform X, he outlined two key observations about the trajectory of cryptocurrency and its broader societal implications.

Eli Ben-Sasson first suggested that cryptocurrency has yet to achieve true product-market fit. Drawing a comparison to modern AI, which emerged later but quickly became embedded in everyday life, he argued that cryptocurrency remains in an early stage of adoption. While the technology has generated considerable interest and experimentation, it has not yet reached the level of ubiquity or integration seen in other breakthrough innovations. He emphasized that the sector is still developing the applications and infrastructure necessary to make cryptocurrency a seamless part of mainstream economic activity, but he remains confident that this point will eventually be reached.

Beyond adoption metrics, Eli Ben-Sasson highlighted the potential of cryptocurrency to fundamentally reshape how society operates. He argued that decentralized, self-custodial, and sovereign financial systems could transform markets, the flow of money, and the structure of the economy itself. In this vision, cryptocurrency is not merely an investment vehicle or technological curiosity; it represents a new paradigm for managing value and trust in society. According to him, as these systems mature, they may redefine how future generations—our children—interact with money, organize economic activity, and structure their daily lives, embedding principles of decentralization and personal sovereignty into the foundation of modern society.

Why Crypto’s Path To Mass Adoption Is Structurally Different From AI’s

The expert’s perspective frames cryptocurrency not only as a technological innovation but also as a societal experiment, with implications that extend far beyond trading and investment into the very architecture of economic and social life.

However, this comparison overlooks a crucial distinction in their respective starting points. AI leveraged existing global infrastructure, tapping into mature networks, cloud computing platforms, and billions of connected devices, which allowed it to scale fast and reach mass adoption almost immediately. 

Cryptocurrency, by contrast, is constructing its own foundational systems from scratch, including distributed networks, decentralized ledgers, and self-sovereign financial protocols. Unlike AI, which could piggyback on pre-existing technological and institutional frameworks, cryptocurrency  must simultaneously solve challenges in security, governance, scalability, and user accessibility while also cultivating trust among participants. 

This foundational work is inherently slower and more complex, but it also represents the creation of entirely new infrastructure that could redefine how value and information are exchanged at a global scale.

From Scale To Maturity: How Institutional Adoption And Market Infrastructure Are Bringing Crypto Closer

As of today, regarding product–market fit, the cryptocurrency sector appears to be progressing slowly but in a clearly directional way. By late January 2026, Bitcoin’s market capitalization stood at approximately $1.73 trillion, underscoring the scale cryptocurrency has already reached. On the decentralized finance (DeFi) side, total value locked across protocols is estimated at around $120 billion, according to DeFiLlama, indicating that substantial on-chain liquidity now exists, even if it remains concentrated within a relatively small number of chains and applications.

Institutional adoption provides an additional signal of maturation. Since their approval in 2024, US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have accumulated roughly $1.25 trillion in assets under management, highlighting the strength of demand from traditional financial channels and the importance of regulated access points. At the banking level, analysis from River suggests that by late 2025 nearly 60% of the 25 largest US banks were actively developing or offering Bitcoin-related services, including custody, trading, and advisory products, pointing to a growing degree of integration between cryptocurrency markets and the conventional financial system.

Taken together, these indicators suggest that many of the core structural foundations for adoption are now in place. Liquidity, institutional access, and regulatory on-ramps have advanced meaningfully over the past years, even if broad consumer usage still lags behind. 

From this perspective, the remaining gap to true product–market fit appears less about existential viability and more about refinement: simplifying user experience, reducing operational and security friction, and demonstrating everyday utility that clearly outweighs “threats”. If those conditions continue to improve, adoption is likely to follow gradually rather than explosively, unfolding as cryptocurrency becomes incrementally more usable, familiar, and economically compelling to a wider public.

Cryptocurrency is already beginning to reshape how parts of society operate, gradually influencing markets and economic behavior as regulatory frameworks and institutional participation continue to develop. While these systems are still in an early stage of maturity, their trajectory suggests a longer-term redefinition of how people interact with money and financial infrastructure. 

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