In early 2024, the venture capital firm A16z Crypto predicted that the crypto industry was on the cusp of a new era of mass consumer adoption. As set out in the book Read Write Own, authored by one of the firm’s partners, decentralized blockchain-based apps would come to challenge a host of social media and other services. That era, though, has yet to materialize. Instead, the dominant trend in crypto has been Wall Street’s rapid adoption of blockchain, as A16z Crypto’s Guy Wuollet explained on the latest episode of Fortune’s Crypto Playbook, which you can hear on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
“Crypto is growing up in many ways, which is wonderful to see. We often talk about crypto maybe being in its collared-shirt era, where we’re definitely not wearing a suit to work every day yet, but we’ve definitely left mom’s basement and are kind of growing up,” said Wuollet, a computer scientist who in 2025 became general partner at A16z Crypto (a spinoff of Andreessen Horowitz).
This current “collared-shirt” era reflects the likes of BlackRock and Fidelity offering not only Bitcoin in ETF wrappers, but embracing blockchain technology in the form of stablecoins and tokenized equities.
This recent embrace by the biggest names in traditional finance has helped bring blockchain into the mainstream, but the trend has not brought about one of the primary goals of longtime crypto boosters: the spread of decentralized technology into day-to-day life. Wuollet, though, says the current era of crypto is not being defined only by Wall Street, but by another emerging trend.Namely, Wuollet points to the convergence of blockchain and AI that is setting the stage for crypto-powered agentic commerce. In practice, this will entail the emerging army of agents, used by both developers and ordinary consumers, engaging in a wide variety of online transactions. In this world, blockchain’s tamper-proof, always-on payments rails could play a central role, especially when it comes to micropayments.
