Crypto Behaves Like Digital Land—Not Tech—And That’s What Makes It Fascinating | 2025 Perspective
Crypto’s dirty little secret? It’s more medieval fiefdom than Silicon Valley disruptor.
Why digital gold acts like dirt
Blockchain doesn’t follow Moore’s Law—it obeys the brutal economics of location, location, location. The best protocols aren’t faster processors; they’re Wall Street-grade toll roads extracting rent from every transaction.
The irony? TradFi banks now FOMO into ‘decentralized’ systems that recreate their own rent-seeking models—just with worse UX and more Elon memes.
Here’s the bullish case: unlike apps, crypto’s value compounds through network effects that make Manhattan real estate look liquid. The early ‘land grabs’ (Bitcoin in 2009, Ethereum in 2015) now command valuations that would make a Central Park penthouse blush.
Warning: contains 90% speculation, 10% tech, and 100% schadenfreude watching hedge funds try to explain JPEGs as ‘store of value’ to their compliance departments.
L1s: The settlements on the frontier
Each layer-1 blockchain—Ethereum (ETH), solana (SOL), Bitcoin—is like a frontier town built on a stretch of untamed land. These towns are primitive at first: maybe there’s a saloon, a dusty main street, and a few folks building homes with their bare hands. The early settlers (developers, speculators, and infrastructure teams) are there because they believe in the potential value of the land, even if it’s risky, volatile, or barren right now.
Each L1 town competes to attract settlers and capital. Some towns are built around natural resources (Bitcoin: sound money), others around fertile soil (Ethereum: programmability), or strategic location (Solana: performance). But in every case, the pitch is the same: “Come build your future here.”
L2s: Roads, railways, and utilities
Layer 2s—such as Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP), ZKsync (ZK)—are the infrastructure that makes these towns livable. They’re the roads and railways that connect remote settlements to trade networks, or the plumbing and electricity that let you shower and charge your devices. Without them, most people wouldn’t settle here—it’s just too rough.
Rollups, zk-tech, bridges: these technologies might not be glamorous, but they’re essential to smoothing the terrain of a raw L1. They reduce congestion, improve speed, and make it feasible to imagine towns becoming cities. In many ways, the current moment in crypto is a race to lay down the interstate system in preparation for a wave of expected settlers (though the jury is still out on what is going to bring said settlers).
DeFi: The mercantile economy
DeFi protocols are the general stores, trading posts, and banks of the frontier. They let people exchange value, take out loans to build more infrastructure, and speculate on which towns will prosper. They’re risky—sometimes you get swindled or the bank disappears overnight—but they’re necessary to bootstrap a local economy.
Blockchain x AI: Gold beneath the mountains
With the breakneck pace of AI advancement over the last two years–and concerns mounting over the power that centralized “Big AI” companies will wield–the crypto space might actually find a killer use case that matters. If blockchains are towns, then AI is the Gold buried in the surrounding hills.
And it makes sense: the AI models need governance and provenance, the data needs to be decentralized, and the compute needs to be shared. Blockchain provides the ledger, the incentive structure, and (maybe) the ethical scaffolding.
Several projects are making their bids for the gold rush in the machine economy—including NEAR, Peaq, and Akash—though it remains to be seen whether this value can be easily extracted (like panning for gold), or requires a complete rethinking of the terrain (like blowing up an entire mountain).
Why the mainstream hasn’t moved in yet
All metaphors have their limit—and we are reaching the end of this one—but it still provides us with the intuition on why crypto is still chasing that ever-elusive “mass adoption.”
Every single crypto project I’ve worked with (from L1s, to L2s, to DeFi protocols) faces the same dual mandate: 1) Getting speculators excited (i.e., generating awareness and attracting liquidity) and 2) Recruiting builders and entrepreneurs.
This becomes a chicken-and-egg problem. You want speculators to believe your town is worth their risk, and builders to believe their time and effort will be rewarded. And what both speculators and builders want to see is users.
But the average person (i.e., user) still lives in well-established cities. They have reliable services, recognizable institutions, and functioning economies. The frontier is messy. Buggy apps, high gas fees, bad UX. Moving here, to crypto frontier land, still requires conviction or an extremely high risk tolerance.
But the people building these towns believe—fervently—that eventually, the infrastructure will catch up. The plumbing will work. The sidewalks will be paved. And the advantages of sovereignty, transparency, and economic participation will be too compelling to ignore.
The frontier is taking shape
The frontier metaphor helps explain why crypto feels both chaotic and inevitable. It behaves more like a territorial expansion than a technology cycle. And while this is not the first time crypto has been compared to the “wild west,” by taking the comparison a few steps further, we can understand why every year in crypto feels like fits and starts of uneven progress. The truth is, not every outpost will survive, and in the end, the landscape will be littered with ghost towns (already termed “ghost chains”). But with the maturing of the category and convergence of technologies like AI, the gold rush is surely not over.
Carolyn Rogers is a marketing executive and strategist with DEEP expertise across the crypto industry and broader emerging tech landscape. She has led brand, content, and go-to-market initiatives for top layer-1 blockchains, web3 startups, and enterprise technology firms. She is a regular commentator and contributor on technology trends and was most recently Head of Marketing at Blokhaus, where she advised startups and emerging projects on positioning and marketing strategy.
