Crypto Enters 'Middle Game' Phase, Says Industry Leader

Crypto industry leader Jeff Park has made an interesting comparison between the current state of cryptocurrency and Nvidia's pre-mainstream AI era. In a recent post, he argued that crypto is in a 'middle game' phase, where the technology is not yet widely adopted but is being developed by early adopters.

Park pointed out that before GPUs became central to the AI boom, they were sustained by gamers, hobbyists, and researchers who pushed their capabilities without necessarily knowing they were helping subsidize a much larger computing transition. Similarly, he noted that early DeFi played a comparable role for crypto by subsidizing the development path toward institutional tokenization.

The core of Park's argument is that crypto's hardest phase is not the early ideological phase or the eventual mature phase. It is the transitional stage between them. He used Elon Musk's remarks about autonomous driving as an analogy to describe this phase. The '0-10 mph' phase was permissionless money, a use case he said people could understand from a practical standpoint. However, the '50 mph+' phase will be onchain capital markets becoming obvious due to self-custody, capital efficiency, and settlement optimization.

Park also drew a distinction between Bitcoin and the wider crypto sector, while rejecting the idea that support for one must exclude the other. He said Bitcoin and crypto are not trying to solve identical problems, even if both originate from a similar ideological impulse around open access.