Author: Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital

Translator: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

Most people view on-chain technology as a faster, more efficient version of existing technology: faster payments, lower settlement costs, more efficient capital markets. Their perspective is not wrong. This alone holds immense opportunities and will foster many outcomes with venture capital scale over the next decade.

But I believe this is only a small part of the story.

When I examine this technology, looking at the various possibilities enabled by programmable assets in a global, composable, always-on environment, I think we have merely explored the tip of the iceberg. The most astonishing things have yet to be created. The reason they have not been created is not that the technology is not mature, but that we have yet to complete our conception of them.

Email Trap

At the dawn of the internet, the most obvious use was communication. Email is faster and cheaper than letters. Email is significant, but its original purpose was not to speed up postal operations. It stands on its own and quickly became widespread. So if you evaluated the internet in 1995 and saw that email was widely adopted, you could reasonably conclude that previous theories had been validated.

But most opportunities were not even budding at that time. Search, social networking, e-commerce, cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), streaming — these are not “accelerated versions of existing things,” but entirely new domains that could not exist before the internet created the conditions for them. Google is not a faster library, Facebook is not a faster phone book, and AWS is not a faster server room. They only became meaningful after the establishment of a globally interconnected, programmable network.

Overall, these new categories are several orders of magnitude larger than the "faster communication" use case.

I believe cryptocurrency is in a flourishing period right now. Most of the attention is focused on how to make existing financial products function better on-chain, such as faster settlement, cheaper cross-border payments, tokenized government bonds and stocks, and more efficient lending markets. And these efforts are also yielding results: by 2025, the settlement amount for stablecoins will reach $33 trillion, and the market value of tokenized government bonds has recently surpassed $15 billion. The world's largest asset management firms and banks are building businesses on public chains.

This is fantastic. I am excited about all of this. I invest energy in it every day. But this is just the most obvious application scenario, perfectly aligned with our existing knowledge systems and massive in scale, easily leading one to mistakenly believe this is all the opportunity there is.

The question I am more interested in is: what becomes possible only when we have programmable resources in a global, composable, always-on, permissionless environment? What are the new verbs, what are the unnamed categories?

What New Verbs Look Like

We have at least one clear example worth a close examination, as it illustrates what I believe we will frequently see.

What would you think if you could borrow a billion dollars without collateral, and the lender had a mathematical guarantee of repayment?

This is flash loans: borrowing any amount of funds without collateral, as long as it is repaid in the same transaction. If the repayment fails, the entire transaction is automatically reverted as if it never happened. The lender has no risk. No credit checks. No relationship needed. No collateral. Just relying on the system's own logic for assurance.

Before flash loans appeared, nobody needed them. Why? The concept is entirely inconsistent with the traditional financial system. It was even useless before programmable assets existed, so there were no existing categories to improve upon. A lending function that requires no collateral, has unlimited amounts, and guarantees repayments is impossible in any system that requires time for transactions. It only becomes feasible when the execution process is atomic, the assets are programmable, and the entire sequence of operations either completes fully or does not happen at all.

Once atomicity makes it feasible, flash loans become standard tools in the on-chain economy for arbitrage, liquidation, collateral swapping, and capital efficiency strategies, which cannot be achieved in traditional payment systems. Of course, any powerful new technology is prone to being maliciously exploited, which only highlights the innovation of its underlying mechanisms.

Flash loans did not make borrowing faster or cheaper. They created a way of borrowing that was structurally impossible before the emergence of programmable assets and atomic execution. This is what I refer to as "new verbs" or "new actions." The system is now capable of doing things it could not do before, not because someone found an optimization, but because the fundamental principles themselves have changed.

Limits of Imagination

But I must be honest about the limitations of my imagination.

I can describe this design space in abstract terms. Public blockchains introduce a set of fundamental concepts that did not exist before: atomic execution, shared global state, programmable custody, deterministic settlement, composability across independent participants, and software assets. We have never had a financial system that integrates settlement, custody, clearing, and execution all in the same programmable environment. When previously separate layers merge, new things become possible.

But I cannot tell you exactly what those things are. And I think that is exactly the point.

Human imagination looks backward. We are very good at improving upon what exists, but not very good at imagining things that could not possibly exist yesterday. We look at on-chain technology and instinctively ask: what existing products can this make faster or cheaper? Yet the more difficult and valuable question is: what entirely unprecedented things can it create?

I have some intuitions. Programmable custody systems that enforce complex protocols without intermediaries. Capital can be entrusted to software agents functioning within a defined scope. Financial structures can be built and dismantled in real-time based on on-chain validated conditions. These directions feel right. But the most significant applications may be those I cannot yet describe, because they are entirely unlike anything I have seen before.

Not being able to list them precisely is, in fact, the strongest evidence for this argument: if I could easily list out all the wholly new things, they would not be truly new. The design space is vast and mostly unexplored, with intuition alone unable to sketch it. That is the key.

Therefore, most of the attempts made in this field will fail. The vastness of the design space does not mean that outcomes are easy to achieve. But the opportunities embodied in truly effective solutions are enormous, and we have dedicated the past thirteen years to building pattern recognition technology in order to identify them before they become apparent. It is this opportunity that fills me with anticipation for the next decade.

Most opportunities still lie ahead.

If the internet analogy holds, then the services corresponding to search, social, cloud computing, and SaaS in the on-chain economy have yet to be built. Email was a trillion-dollar industry, and the other services that spun off from it are worth trillions more.

I believe that in ten years when we look back, what excites us the most will be the things that do not exist today. This is not just about improving the efficiency of banks, exchanges, or asset management firms, but about achievements that can only be realized when we have programmable assets in a composable, global, around-the-clock environment. These things will seem obvious in retrospect, but we cannot foresee them now because there are no precedents.

Flash loans give us a glimpse, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The design space is immensely vast, and we have only just begun to explore it.

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