Crypto must cement adoption to withstand US policy shifts: Canton CEO

The Policy Shield is Made of Users, Not Lawyers

We have spent a lot of time watching the clock in Washington. The industry is currently obsessed with which way the regulatory wind blows, hoping for a favorable breeze that finally lets us build without a subpoena looming overhead. But Yuval Rooz, the CEO of Canton, recently pointed out something that founders often forget while they are busy hiring lobbyists: policy is fickle, but utility is permanent.

Rooz made a compelling comparison to the early days of Uber and Airbnb. Those companies didn't wait for a perfect regulatory framework to exist before they launched. In many cities, they were technically operating in a grey area or outright defiance of existing taxi and hospitality laws. But they provided a service so much better than the status quo that they became essential to the public. By the time regulators tried to shut them down, the users fought back.

For those of us building in crypto and AI, the message is clear. If you want to withstand the inevitable policy reversals that come with every new election cycle, you have to build something that people actually use every day. You need the Uber effect.

Building for the Public, Not the SEC

The crypto industry has a bad habit of building for itself. We create complex DeFi protocols that only a handful of power users understand, or we launch governance tokens that serve no purpose other than speculation. This makes us an easy target. If a regulator shuts down a niche yield farm, the average person on the street doesn't blink. They don't even know it happened.

Now, compare that to what would happen if the government tried to ban high-speed internet or smartphone apps. There would be an immediate, visceral outcry because those technologies are woven into the fabric of daily life. Rooz is suggesting that blockchain needs to reach that same level of saturation to become truly untouchable.

As a founder, this changes your roadmap. Instead of asking how to make your project more compliant, you should be asking how to make it more indispensable. Compliance matters, obviously, but a compliant product with zero users is still just a dead project. A useful product with a million users is a political powerhouse.

The Fragility of Political Wins

We are currently seeing a bit of a thaw in U.S. crypto policy, but anyone who has been in this space for more than a week knows that sentiment can flip overnight. A single bad actor or a market crash can turn a friendly regulator into an adversary. Relying on the goodwill of D.C. is a strategy built on sand.

The real defense mechanism isn't a friendly administration; it's a massive, vocal user base. When you have millions of people relying on your infrastructure to send money, secure their data, or run their businesses, you aren't just a startup anymore. You are a public utility. Governments find it much harder to kill utilities than they do to kill experiments.

Real adoption creates a moat that no amount of lobbying money can buy. When the product becomes part of the culture, the law eventually catches up to the reality on the ground.

What This Means for Builders

If you are in the trenches right now, you need to stop focusing on the macro and start focusing on the micro-interactions of your users. We need to move past the infrastructure phase. We have enough Layer 1s and Layer 2s. What we don't have enough of are applications that a grandmother can use without knowing what a seed phrase is.

To achieve the kind of adoption Rooz is talking about, we have to solve the friction problem. Uber didn't win because people loved the idea of ride-sharing; it won because it was easier than calling a taxi. Blockchain will win when it's easier than using a bank, not just when it's more decentralized.

• Focus on Invisible Tech: The best blockchain apps will be the ones where the user doesn't even know they are using a blockchain.
• Solve Real-World Pain: Stop solving problems that only exist in crypto. Solve problems that exist in the real economy, like settlement times, transparency in supply chains, or data ownership.
• Build for Retention, Not Hype: A user who stays for three years is worth more than a thousand users who show up for an airdrop and leave.

The Long Game of Utility

There is a tendency in this industry to celebrate every minor legal victory as if the war is over. It’s not. Policy reversals are part of the game. The only way to win the game is to make the technology so vital that reversing the policy becomes a political liability. That is the hurdle we haven't cleared yet.

We are still in the stage where blockchain is seen as an optional, speculative asset class by most of the world. As long as that is the case, we remain at the mercy of whoever happens to be sitting in the Oval Office or the chair of the SEC. To move beyond that, we have to stop talking to ourselves and start building for everyone else.

The next few years will be a race. Not just a race for capital, but a race for relevance. The projects that survive the next decade won't be the ones with the best legal teams, but the ones that people refuse to live without. That’s the founder’s perspective that actually matters.

Read the original at Cointelegraph →