[Recap] Practical Applications of Crypto: What Will See Long-Term Traction?
On May 20, The Tie hosted a panel with Rok Kopp (Co-Founder, ether.fi), Rena Shah (President, Stacks Endowment), and Arpan Gautam (CEO & Co-Founder, Noon Capital), moderated by Boomer Saraga from The Tie.
Watch the full webinar below.
One of the most interesting moments in the conversations was almost a throwaway. Rena mentioned having an ether.fi card connected to an AI agent that reads her calendar and books Ubers automatically. No app, no manual input. That, she said, is what actually makes crypto accessible to people who have no reason to care about crypto.
It was a good encapsulation of where the panel thinks this is heading.
What's actually working
Rok has been explicit about ether.fi's direction: they are building a neobank, not a DeFi protocol. The card hit $3.8 million in transaction volume the day before the webinar, annualizing past $1 billion. The competitors he named in three to five years are Revolut, Robinhood, and Coinbase. The non-custodial structure is a speed advantage: no jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction licensing required to expand.
Rena's frame is that Bitcoin without applications is a slow-moving tragedy of the commons. Miners need fees. If nobody builds on Bitcoin, the network eventually stops being worth securing. The Stacks Endowment funds only one thing: on-chain transactions that generate fees back to Bitcoin miners. Grantees are building Bitcoin-backed stablecoins, lending markets, and private credit. The staking product has distributed 4,293 BTC in yield to date.
Arpan’s pitch at Noon is a yield-bearing stablecoin that reallocates automatically across seven yield sources depending on what the market is returning. Right now, that is mostly private credit, with DeFi lending rates soft. When that changes, the allocation shifts. One category on the near-term roadmap: preferred vehicles from digital asset treasury companies, which offer a dividend but carry junior risk. The underwriting question is not just creditworthiness but under what specific conditions it holds, because a stablecoin cannot have a down day.
What is not working
Token incentives as a growth strategy came up as the most overused playbook. It pulls in mercenary capital that leaves the moment incentives dry up. The irony, as Boomer noted, is that DeFi Summer was pure incentive farming and it did bring in users who stuck around. But most of the protocols that ran those programs are gone.
DAO governance also got called out. The idea that decentralized token-holder voting could run a protocol as a business has largely not delivered. The projects that have found their footing have moved toward council or consortium models with actual decision-making authority.
On barriers
Security and UX came up repeatedly as the two things still blocking broader adoption. Crypto UX was bad partly by design: building in KYC and clean interfaces felt legally risky for years. As regulation has clarified, that is slowly unwinding.
The more forward-looking point was about AI agents. If agents start handling wallets and payments in the background, users may never have to interact with crypto infrastructure directly. That abstraction layer, more than any product redesign, might be what drives the next wave of adoption.