I was watching a panel at Consensus a few weeks ago. The discussion was about UX - the argument being that confusing interfaces and jargon are what's holding crypto back. It’s a common diagnosis across many industries that try to combine accessibility with technical products. But, while the likes of Circle et al. were pushing that narrative, I couldn’t help but feel like that was the easy thing to blame.
Standardisation Is the Key
Let me tell you a different story first. It’s a tangent, but bear with me as it sets the scene.
The Republic of Genoa built one of the most sophisticated trading networks the medieval world had ever seen. They planted outposts across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean - physical on-ramps into distant markets, each one a node in a growing commercial web.
But what made it work wasn't the outposts. It was standardisation. Genoa introduced the genovino - a gold coin, fixed standard - and suddenly trade across all those disparate nodes became predictable, trusted, and scalable. When the Ottomans closed the routes and the outposts were gone, Genoa didn't collapse. It pivoted. Became the financial backbone of the Spanish Empire. Channelled capital into an entirely new phase of expansion.
Crypto is somewhere in the early chapters of that story. We need to recognise that we are still in the early adoption phase. We are in this trading post phase - isolated exchanges, fragmented stablecoin issuers, inconsistent rails. The infrastructure exists, in pieces. But there is no genovino. There is no standard. And until there is, we're not going anywhere fast.
