Crypto Twitter celebrates DeFi protocols. LinkedIn posts praise enterprise blockchain. Conferences showcase NFT art galleries.
But nobody mentions the industries where crypto actually solves real problems. The ones with millions of users. The ones generating actual revenue.
Why? Because they’re “inappropriate” for polite crypto conversation.
Crypto has an image problem. It’s trying to be legitimate. Institutional. Respectable. Banks are buying Bitcoin. ETFs are getting approved. Regulators are writing frameworks.
So the industry stays quiet about the sectors that proved crypto’s utility years before Wall Street cared. The industries that taught millions of regular people how wallets work. How to send transactions. How to actually use crypto instead of just holding it.
We pretend these use cases don’t exist because they don’t fit the narrative we’re selling to regulators and pension funds.
Online gaming. Betting. Entertainment platforms where real money moves. These sectors embraced crypto when everyone else was still calling it “magic internet money.” They solved real UX problems. Built working payment rails. Created experiences that traditional finance couldn’t match.
The best crypto casino platforms process more transactions in a day than most “revolutionary” DeFi protocols handle in a month. Real users. Real volume. Real utility.
But you won’t see this mentioned at Consensus. It doesn’t get covered in institutional crypto reports. The industry’s pretending it doesn’t exist.
By ignoring successful crypto use cases because they’re “controversial,” we’re lying about what crypto actually does well. We’re building narratives around hypothetical future utility while ignoring proven current utility.
DeFi is interesting. But most protocols have 10,000 users doing circular yield farming. Meanwhile, platforms the industry won’t acknowledge have millions of people using crypto for its actual purpose: fast, borderless payments that traditional finance can’t or won’t provide.
This disconnect is bizarre. It’s like the internet industry in 1998 refusing to discuss email because spam exists. Or ignoring e commerce because people buy things we don’t approve of.
Crypto celebrates peer to peer cash. Unless people use it for things we find uncomfortable. Then suddenly we only want to talk about “legitimate” use cases.
We praise decentralization and censorship resistance. Until someone uses those properties in a way that might upset regulators. Then we distance ourselves and talk about “bad actors.”
We can’t have it both ways. Either crypto enables financial freedom and access, or it’s just another system where gatekeepers decide what’s acceptable. The discomfort we feel doesn’t change the technology’s value proposition.
The gaming and entertainment sectors proved something important: crypto works when you build systems around its strengths instead of trying to retrofit it into legacy finance.
Instant deposits. Instant withdrawals. No chargebacks. No bank holds. No arbitrary account closures. Global access without currency conversion. Provably fair systems running on chain.
These aren’t theoretical benefits. They’re working features that millions of people use daily. The technology isn’t perfect, but it’s functional. It solves real friction points.
Traditional finance can’t compete here. Not because gambling is special, but because crypto’s properties speed, borderlessness, permissionlessness matter more in this context than in buying coffee.
Most people’s first crypto transaction isn’t buying an NFT or using Uniswap. It’s something the industry doesn’t want to publicize. Something that falls outside our carefully constructed narrative of “blockchain for good.”
But these experiences teach real lessons. How gas fees work. Why network congestion matters. What happens when you send to the wrong address. The difference between L1 and L2. Actual crypto usage, not theoretical understanding.
By ignoring this, we’re pretending the learning curve doesn’t exist. We act like mainstream adoption will happen through CEX interfaces that hide all the blockchain stuff. But that’s not crypto adoption. That’s just traditional finance with different backend infrastructure.
Some of the best wallet UX came from platforms the industry won’t discuss. Some of the smartest contract security auditing. Some of the most efficient payment processing.
These teams had to solve real problems with real users who’d leave if the experience sucked. No investor presentations. No token drops. Just: make it work or lose customers.
This produced better products than many “legitimate” crypto companies with hundreds of millions in funding. Because actual users are harder to satisfy than VCs pitching narratives.
By refusing to acknowledge where crypto works, we’re cutting ourselves off from useful data. These platforms process billions in transactions. Handle millions of users. Solve real technical challenges.
But we don’t study them. Don’t learn from them. Don’t apply their solutions to “respectable” crypto products. Because that would require admitting they exist.
This slows down the entire industry. We’re solving problems that entertainment platforms figured out years ago, but we’re reinventing the wheel because we won’t look at their code.
The funny part? Regulators know exactly where crypto gets used. They’re not confused. They track these transactions. They understand the volumes.
Our pretending accomplishes nothing except making crypto look naive. Like we think if we don’t talk about certain sectors, regulators won’t notice them.
They noticed. The silence just makes us look dishonest. Like we’re trying to hide something instead of openly acknowledging that crypto serves many purposes, some of which make compliance people uncomfortable.
Crypto needs to be honest about its use cases. All of them. Not just the ones that look good in Congressional testimony.
Yes, people use it for international remittances. Also for avoiding capital controls. For investment. For speculation. For privacy. And for entertainment platforms that traditional finance won’t serve.
These aren’t competing narratives. They’re all true simultaneously. The technology is neutral. What people do with it varies. Pretending otherwise doesn’t change reality.
These sectors aren’t just large users of crypto. They’re proving grounds for features the rest of the industry needs. Instant micropayments. Cross chain bridges. Gas fee optimization. Wallet abstraction.
When a platform needs to process 100,000 transactions per hour with sub-second confirmation times, they solve problems that theoretical DeFi protocols never encounter. These solutions then get adopted elsewhere.
But only if we acknowledge they exist.
If crypto is supposed to enable financial freedom and borderless payments, why do we judge what people spend it on?
That judgment contradicts the entire value proposition. Either we believe in permissionless finance or we don’t. The discomfort we feel about certain use cases doesn’t change the technology’s purpose.
Banks judge transactions. Payment processors censor users. That’s what we’re supposedly building alternatives to. So why are we recreating the same moral framework in crypto?
If you’re building crypto products, you can learn from platforms the industry won’t acknowledge. They’ve solved UX problems you’re currently struggling with. They’ve figured out onboarding flows that convert mainstream users. They’ve built payment rails that actually work at scale.
This knowledge exists. But accessing it requires overcoming the social stigma of admitting these platforms deserve study.
The builders who overcome that stigma will build better products. The ones who don’t will keep reinventing solved problems.
Crypto’s most successful retail applications are the ones the industry won’t promote. The platforms with millions of active users are the ones we pretend don’t exist.
Meanwhile, we celebrate protocols with 5,000 users and call them “mass adoption.” We write thinkpieces about hypothetical use cases while ignoring proven ones.
This disconnect isn’t sustainable. At some point, the industry needs to reconcile its narratives with reality.
The crypto industry can keep pretending certain sectors don’t exist. Keep writing them out of adoption stories. Keep celebrating theoretical utility over proven use cases.
Or we can acknowledge that crypto serves many purposes. Some align with our preferred narratives. Others don’t. All of them matter for understanding what the technology actually does.
The second path is more honest. Also more uncomfortable. But honesty about crypto’s real use cases beats fantasy narratives about its hypothetical future.
The industries crypto won’t discuss are often the ones where crypto works best. Where the technology’s advantages are most obvious. Where millions of regular people use it daily.
Ignoring this doesn’t change reality. It just makes the industry look disconnected from its own success stories.
Maybe it’s time to stop being embarrassed about what crypto actually does well. And start learning from the platforms that figured it out first.
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