Masa Depan Kripto: Dari Aset Spekulatif Menjadi Fondasi Internet - ChainCatcher

Original Title: Crypto is going mainstream—just not in the way you might think
Original Author: @binafisch
Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note:

Cryptocurrency is going mainstream, but the way it’s happening may be completely different from what you imagine. It won’t appear in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana, nor will it be dominated by NFT art or meme coins. Instead, it will quietly integrate into the underlying layers of digital finance and the internet, serving as a secure communication layer between applications—much like the shift from HTTP to HTTPS.

Today, stablecoin trading volume is close to that of Visa and PayPal. Web3 is “invisibly” entering daily life. In the future, Layer 1 will no longer be a “world computer,” but rather a “world database,” providing a trusted shared data source for millions of applications.

This article takes you deep into the logic behind this transformation: Why is interoperability key? Why will business models be restructured as AI and blockchain converge? And why is the future of frictionless finance not a single giant chain, but a universal foundational layer?

The original text is as follows:

Cryptocurrency is going mainstream, just not in the way you might think.

It won’t look like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana, nor will it be dominated by NFT art or meme coins, and it’s even less likely to be EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) or SVM (Solana Virtual Machine). Blockchains will quietly integrate into the network, becoming a secure communication layer between applications—much like the shift from HTTP to HTTPS. The impact will be profound, but for users and developers, the experience will hardly change. This shift is already underway.

Stablecoins, essentially fiat balances on blockchains, currently process about $9 trillion in adjusted annual transaction volume, on par with Visa and PayPal. Stablecoins are fundamentally no different from PayPal dollars; the difference is that blockchains provide a safer, more interoperable transport layer. After more than a decade, ETH has still not been widely used as currency and is easily replaced by stablecoins. ETH’s value stems from the demand for Ethereum block space and the cash flow generated by staking incentives. On Hyperliquid, the highest trading volume assets are synthetic representations of traditional stocks and indices, not native crypto tokens.

The main reason existing financial networks are integrating blockchains as a secure communication layer is interoperability. Today, a PayPal user cannot easily pay a LINE Pay user. If PayPal and LINE Pay operated as chains like Base and Arbitrum, then market makers like Across, Relay, Eco, or deBridge could facilitate these transfers instantly. PayPal users wouldn’t need a LINE account, nor would LINE users need a PayPal account. Blockchains enable this kind of interoperability and permissionless integration between applications.

The recent buzz around Monad as the next major EVM ecosystem shows that the crypto space is still clinging to outdated mindsets. Monad has a carefully designed consensus system and strong performance, but these features are no longer unique. Fast finality is now just a basic requirement. The idea that developers will migrate en masse and lock themselves into a new single ecosystem is not supported by the last decade’s experience. EVM applications can migrate between chains easily, and the broader internet will not be rebuilt within a single virtual machine.

The Future Role of Decentralized Layer 1: World Database, Not World Computer

Or in crypto terms: The base layer for Layer 2 chains.

Modern digital applications are essentially modular. There are millions of web and mobile applications worldwide, each using its own development frameworks, programming languages, and server architectures, maintaining an ordered list of transactions that define its state.

In crypto terms, each application is already an app-chain. The problem is that these app-chains lack a secure, shared source of truth. Querying app state requires trusting centralized servers that may fail or be attacked. Ethereum originally tried to solve this with the world computer model: in this model, every application is a smart contract in a single virtual machine, validators re-execute every transaction, compute the entire global state, and run consensus protocols to agree. Ethereum updates its state roughly every 15 minutes, at which point transactions are considered confirmed.

This approach has two main problems: it doesn’t scale, and it can’t offer enough customization for real applications. The key insight is that applications shouldn’t run in a single global virtual machine but should continue to operate independently, using their own servers and architectures, while publishing their ordered transactions to a decentralized Layer 1 database. Layer 2 clients can read this ordered log and independently compute application state.

This new model is both scalable and flexible, able to support large platforms like PayPal, Zelle, Alipay, Robinhood, Fidelity, or Coinbase with only moderate adjustments to their infrastructure. These applications don’t need to be rewritten for EVM or SVM; they just need to publish transactions to the shared, secure database. If privacy is important, they can publish encrypted transactions and distribute decryption keys to specific clients.

Underlying Principle: How the World Database Scales

Scaling a world database is much easier than scaling a world computer. The world computer requires validators to download, verify, and execute every transaction from every application globally, which is costly in computation and bandwidth. The bottleneck is that every validator must fully execute the global state transition function.

In a world database, validators only need to ensure data availability, block order consistency, and that once finality is reached, the order is irreversible. They don’t need to execute any application logic; they just need to store and propagate the data in a way that guarantees honest nodes can reconstruct the full dataset. Therefore, validators don’t even have to receive full copies of every transaction block.

Erasure coding makes this possible. For example, suppose a 1MB block is split into 10 parts using erasure coding and distributed to 10 validators, each receiving about one-tenth of the data, but any 7 validators can combine to reconstruct the entire block. This means that as the number of applications increases, the number of validators can also increase, while each validator’s data load remains constant. If 10 applications generate a 1MB block and there are 100 validators, each validator handles about 10KB of data; with 100 applications and 1,000 validators, each validator still handles the same amount of data.

Validators still need to run consensus protocols but only need to agree on the block hash order, which is much easier than reaching consensus on the results of global execution. As a result, the capacity of the world database can scale with the number of validators and applications, without overloading any validator due to global execution.

Cross-chain Interoperability of Shared World Database

This architecture brings a new challenge: interoperability between Layer 2 chains. Applications within the same virtual machine can communicate synchronously, but applications running on different L2s cannot. For example, with ERC20, if I have USDC on Ethereum and you have JPYC, I can use Uniswap to exchange USDC for JPYC and send it to you in a single transaction, because USDC, JPYC, and the Uniswap contract are coordinated within the same virtual machine.

If PayPal, LINE, and Uniswap each run as independent Layer 2 chains, we need a secure method for cross-chain communication. To pay a LINE user from a PayPal account, Uniswap (on its own independent chain) needs to verify the PayPal transaction, perform multiple swaps, initiate the LINE transaction, confirm completion, and send final confirmation back to PayPal. This is Layer 2 cross-chain messaging.

To do this securely and in real time, two elements are needed:

The target chain must have the latest hash of the source chain’s ordered transactions—usually a Merkle root or similar fingerprint published on the Layer 1 database.

The target chain must be able to verify the correctness of the message without re-executing the entire source chain program. This can be achieved through succinct proofs or trusted execution environments (TEEs).

Real-time cross-chain transactions require a Layer 1 with fast finality, combined with real-time proof generation or TEE verification.

Moving Toward Unified Liquidity and Frictionless Finance

This brings us back to a grander vision. Today, digital finance is fragmented by closed systems, forcing users and liquidity to concentrate on a few dominant platforms. This centralization limits innovation and prevents new financial applications from competing on a level playing field. We envision a world where all digital asset applications are connected through a shared foundational layer, enabling liquidity to flow freely between chains, payments to be seamless, and applications to interact securely and in real time.

The Layer 2 paradigm allows any application to become a Web3 chain, and a high-speed Layer 1 serving only as a world database enables these chains to communicate in real time and interoperate as naturally as smart contracts within a single chain. This is how frictionless finance is born—not through a single all-encompassing mega blockchain, but through a universal foundational layer enabling secure, real-time cross-chain communication.