Encryption is not dead; it is reborn.

Author: Prathik, Thejaswini

Original Title: Built for Humans

Translation and Editing: BitpushNews

For thousands of years, human civilization has evolved in countless ways. Our language, clothing, lifestyles, architecture, community structures, food acquisition methods, and more are constantly changing. Yet, one common trait has persisted throughout human history—the impulse to gamble.

Before the concept of “church” was born, and before the emergence of “nation-states,” humans were already engaging in betting. Among all activities that have remained consistent across cultures and centuries—such as cooking and burying the dead—placing bets on uncertain outcomes has been nearly as fundamental.

The oldest known dice date back over 5,000 years. They were discovered in a set of game devices similar to backgammon, unearthed in a burned city within modern-day Iran, dating to around 2800 BCE. In the 6th century BCE, chariot racing betting was widespread in ancient Rome, attracting all social classes from senators to slaves. A pivotal moment in the Indian mythological epic Mahabharata occurs during a dice game. All four Gospels in the Bible record soldiers casting lots to divide Jesus’ garments after his crucifixion.

Every era and civilization, whether recorded in history or woven into human-made epics, has found ways to stake real wealth on uncertain outcomes. This demonstrates that the desire to say “I know something the world doesn’t” and to be rewarded for that knowledge is inseparable from human nature.

Times change, venues change, but the urge to gamble remains. In fact, it continually evolves over time.

In 1720, the South Sea Company offered the British public a future benefit that could be traded. The promise to convert government debt into stock sparked a speculative frenzy, pushing share prices from about 100 pounds in 1719 to nearly 1,000 pounds in 1720. The potential trade never materialized, and the speculation ended in the infamous financial crash—the “South Sea Bubble”—equivalent to the bursting of the 18th-century internet bubble. Subsequently, the British Parliament banned future speculative risk-taking.

The craving to speculate still exists, just waiting for the next venue.

Throughout the 20th century, traditional finance meticulously built a complex access infrastructure, attempting to reignite this impulse—they designed a whole set of checks and balances: accredited investor thresholds, restrictions on day traders, markets closing at 4 p.m. and reopening the next morning. The implicit message to ordinary people was: “You can speculate, but only if you’re already wealthy, only on our schedule, and after filling out all the paperwork.”

These inconveniences frustrated many, but there was no alternative at the time—until new options emerged.

Look at what happened in the silver market last month.

Silver is one of the oldest traded commodities on Earth. It has its own futures markets, institutional infrastructure, and centuries of price history. In January of this year, a perpetual silver contract launched on Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange (DEX).

Within a month, it handled 2% of global silver trading volume.

Not 2% of the silver traded in the crypto space, but 2% of all silver traded worldwide—done through a protocol with no headquarters, no CEO, and no brokers.

It’s worth exploring where this volume comes from. Hyperliquid’s current user base is primarily crypto-native. But the silver market isn’t. The most reasonable explanation, considering the risks of overgeneralization, is that this market has attracted traders who have always wanted exposure to this risk but are unwilling to endure the friction of traditional infrastructure.

Hyperliquid removes most barriers—no brokers, high margins, minimum account requirements, interface friction—and offers high leverage and lightning-fast settlement. Want to express your view at 3 a.m. on Saturday? No problem—just open the platform, connect your wallet, and speak your mind.

Last month, Hyperliquid processed $2.6 trillion in nominal trading volume, nearly twice that of Coinbase.

But comparing it to other crypto exchanges is secondary. More importantly, perpetual contract DEXs provide humanity with an alternative that surpasses existing traditional financial infrastructure. Don’t mistake the removal of friction for the elimination of risk. The 3 a.m. access without friction also makes it possible to incur catastrophic losses at such abnormal hours. But isn’t that the whole point of speculation? High returns come with high risks. It’s this unrestrained risk that delivers the adrenaline rush unique to gambling.

But gambling has never been just about returns. It’s also about “proving oneself right.”

Every civilization has its oracle. The ancient Greek Oracle of Delphi charged fees for prophecies. Medieval courts often employed astrologers as advisors. The modern version is TV experts earning hefty sums for confidently and charismatically sharing their insights on screen.

Opinions have always held social and economic value. But until recently, what they lacked was a common market price.

That’s where prediction markets come in. They monetize opinions. When you buy a contract on Polymarket or Kalshi, you’re no longer just expressing a view into the void. Your belief is continuously priced against an opponent who disagrees with you. If you’re right, you get paid; if you’re wrong, you pay. This incentive structure and oracle-like mechanism create a level of accountability unseen in ancient commentary.

What interests me more isn’t just the existence of contemporary prediction markets, but where they are headed.

This year’s Golden Globe broadcast partnered with Polymarket, reading odds between commercial breaks. CNN and CNBC signed data agreements with Kalshi. Robinhood launched prediction markets, becoming its fastest-growing revenue line, with an annualized run rate of about $300 million. On Super Bowl Sunday, prediction markets saw over $1 billion in single-day trading volume. Kalshi even integrated payments with Venmo.

These developments aren’t aimed at crypto-first individuals. They target sports bettors and political enthusiasts seeking to turn their perceived knowledge—knowledge the market may not have—into money.

While some see prediction markets as the future of news, their limitations are clear. Insider trading issues persist. But what excites me most is how these markets are opening up a new set of primitives for solving everyday problems—like hedging and insurance.

Not every betting venue is built on such a solid foundation.

In January 2024, pump.fun launched, allowing anyone to create tradable tokens in seconds. The world, which had launched fewer than 10 memecoins in years, suddenly saw over 70,000 tokens issued in a single day at the peak. This frenzy was widely participated in, with people betting on jokes, collective moods, and even political figures. It even extended to former U.S. President Donald Trump.

The TRUMP token, launched just days before his inauguration, attracted buyers worldwide. It reminds us how, in ancient history, people consistently staked money on cultural movements. Cryptocurrency simply makes the entire process programmable, frictionless, and instant.

This is what I find humbling about crypto. It doesn’t get caught up in moral judgments. Yet, the same system that generated roughly $1 billion in revenue for Hyperliquid also enabled pump.fun to earn over $900 million.

Crypto never offered a perfect system from the start. It often introduced imperfect systems as alternatives to existing traditional infrastructure. But interestingly, over time and through multiple iterations, some of these systems have evolved into frictionless, more efficient, and accessible venues—showing both sophistication and recklessness.

We see this pattern in the evolution of capital formation systems. The 2017 ICO boom made a bold promise: anyone could bypass venture capital thresholds to fund and invest in projects. In reality, most failed or were scams. But subsequent iterations and honest reflections on failures followed. Each wave of crypto fundraising addressed a problem while introducing new ones. As a result, today’s frameworks are better at solving these challenges than the primitive primitives of the past.

Many projects now generate auditable revenue before issuing tokens, demonstrating the maturity of the capital formation industry. I don’t see much idealism here. If anything, it’s a more pragmatic approach—this industry is now more realistic about where it can sustainably grow.

This shows how the speculative layer matures over time to satisfy the same ancient human impulse: the desire to gamble.

Beyond speculation, crypto has enabled infrastructure to meet another urgent human need: money transfer.

Although stablecoins’ settlement data remains debated, their deepest application isn’t on trading platforms. They are adopted in countries like Argentina, Nigeria, and Venezuela, where inflation, fragile economies, and weak currencies drive residents to use these digital dollars for daily commerce.

Stablecoins find their product-market fit where traditional institutions—banks and governments—fail to serve local citizens.

Then there’s an even older impulse than speculation: ownership.

Long before humans engaged in betting, they declared sovereignty—territories, livestock, granaries. The concept of “this is mine” is arguably the most fundamental economic act of our species. From Hammurabi’s Code to English common law, most legal systems have spent significant effort defining and protecting “who owns what.”

Traditional finance built complex systems to serve this impulse—deeds, titles, stock certificates, custodians, transfer agents, clearinghouses—an entire industry of intermediaries designed to record and verify ownership. But the problem is: this infrastructure is slow, expensive, and exclusionary. Settling a stock trade still takes a full day. Transferring property can take months. For billions worldwide, many asset classes remain entirely inaccessible.

Tokenization attempts to compress this entire intermediary stack into code. A tokenized U.S. Treasury remains a U.S. Treasury. An ounce of tokenized gold remains an ounce of gold in a vault. What changes is how ownership is recorded, transferred, and used. Settlement becomes instant. Access becomes global. Assets once idle in custodial institutions become programmable and composable.

Tokenized real-world assets (RWA) on public blockchains are approaching $20 billion. Just in January, tokenized U.S. Treasuries surpassed $10 billion—growing tenfold in less than two years; tokenized gold exceeded $6 billion.

These are milestones meaningful to crypto, but tokenized assets still represent only a tiny fraction of global assets. The global gold market exceeds $30 trillion. U.S. Treasuries total $27 trillion. The global real estate market surpasses $300 trillion. Honestly, we are still in early stages.

What’s changed recently isn’t the market size but the participants.

On February 11, 2024, BlackRock listed its tokenized U.S. Treasury fund BUIDL on Uniswap, one of the largest decentralized exchanges in crypto. The world’s largest asset manager, managing $10 trillion, chose to settle tokenized government bonds using public DeFi infrastructure. It also purchased governance tokens of the protocol.

This deal was a year and a half in the making, partly facilitated by Uniswap’s former COO, who previously founded BlackRock’s digital asset division. Meetings alternated between BlackRock’s offices at Hudson Yards and Uniswap’s headquarters in SoHo. It’s hard to imagine two more meaningful offices.

U.S. Treasuries are the backbone collateral of the global financial system. They underpin the $5 trillion repo market, the overnight “pipeline” that sustains bank liquidity. Leverage is built on them. Structured products are anchored to them. Stablecoins are backed by them. As these collateral assets move on-chain, the tools built upon them follow. Lending protocols gain high-quality collateral. Derivative infrastructure connects. Stablecoins are anchored to verifiable on-chain reserves, not off-chain proofs.

BlackRock’s BUIDL is increasingly becoming a cornerstone for other on-chain products. Ethena’s USDtb and Ondo’s OUSG use it as core reserves. It’s accepted as collateral on centralized exchanges. It has expanded across multiple blockchains. The original tokenized fund is quietly becoming foundational infrastructure for other products.

This follows the same pattern. Hyperliquid didn’t invent commodity trading; it just removed friction. Stablecoins didn’t invent the dollar; they simply directed dollars to places banks are reluctant to reach.

Tokenization didn’t invent ownership; it made ownership programmable, portable, and globally accessible—features that the existing intermediary stack was never designed to support.

JPMorgan has run tokenized payments through its Onyx platform. Goldman Sachs operates digital asset infrastructure for institutional clients. The Canton network, supported by BNY Mellon and Deutsche Börse, is building permissioned DeFi infrastructure. And now, BlackRock sits at Uniswap’s table, holding governance tokens of protocols built by anonymous developers.

This mirrors the path stablecoins once took. First skepticism, then cautious experimentation, and finally acknowledgment: for certain use cases, this infrastructure actually works better. Tokenization remains in its second phase. On-chain assets are still just a drop in the ocean compared to the assets they represent. But the direction is no longer in doubt—only the speed.

The most profound technologies that change human life share a common trait: they become “invisible.” Unless something goes wrong, no one notices their value.

Before COVID-19 brought supply chain issues into mainstream awareness, no one thought about containers when ordering new electronics online. No one cared about the submarine cables transmitting 99% of international data. These technologies are embedded in daily life to such an extent that their existence is often overlooked, yet their absence would be unimaginable.

Perpetual contract DEXs have returned the right to form and act on financial opinions to ordinary people, whereas accredited investor rules once stripped that right away;

Prediction markets allow people to bet on their own statements;

Tokenization enables global investors to access assets previously locked behind geographic barriers;

All these primitives address the same fundamental demand: the existing system is built for insiders, restricting outsiders’ access.

The circulation of stablecoins, from just $4.5 billion five years ago to over $30 billion today, has surged more than sixfold. Despite crypto’s existence for over fifteen years, recent focus on institutional-grade privacy has prompted more organizations to evaluate alternatives to traditional infrastructure for cost efficiency.

Crypto has endured failures, frauds, the wild years of casinos, and countless iterations, ultimately building an alternative system—one that doesn’t require permission but satisfies that ancient, unchanging human impulse: to express oneself.

Today, crypto is often dismissed because of its long periods of sideways price action, criticized as an airy castle. But people overlook its seemingly dull underlying layer—the very layer that fulfills one of humanity’s oldest impulses: whether through speculation or value transfer. It’s precisely in this realm that crypto has quietly evolved into an indispensable part of daily life, embedding itself silently into the fabric of everyday existence.