The 2022 crypto crash wiped out a lot of people and projects. It also wiped out a lot of nonsense. What’s emerged since is a smaller, quieter ecosystem that’s actually building useful things.

I was skeptical of Web3 during the boom. The speculation was obviously unsustainable, and most “use cases” were solutions looking for problems. But I’ve been forced to update my priors watching what’s survived and matured since the crash.

Here’s where I see genuine progress.

Stablecoins: The Quiet Utility

Let me start with the most boring corner of crypto, because it’s also the most useful.

Stablecoins - cryptocurrencies pegged to traditional currencies like the US dollar - have found real product-market fit. Not as speculative investments, but as a payment and settlement layer.

The numbers tell the story. Stablecoin transaction volume now regularly exceeds Visa’s daily volume. Most of that isn’t speculation - it’s actual commerce, remittances, and business payments.

Why does this matter? Traditional cross-border payments are slow and expensive. They route through correspondent banking networks that can take days and charge significant fees. Stablecoins settle in minutes at near-zero cost.

For businesses operating across borders, this is genuinely useful. I talked to a founder running a software development agency with contractors in multiple countries. “We switched our international payments to USDC last year,” he told me. “Contractors get paid in hours instead of days, and we’re saving about $40,000 a year in wire fees and currency spreads.”

This isn’t revolutionary. It’s incremental improvement to financial plumbing. But incremental improvements to financial plumbing can be worth billions.

Tokenization of Real-World Assets

The idea of representing real-world assets as tokens on a blockchain sounded like a solution looking for a problem during the boom. Now it’s gaining traction in specific contexts.

BlackRock launched a tokenized money market fund. Franklin Templeton has tokenized fund shares. These aren’t crypto companies playing with toys - they’re the largest asset managers in the world, and they see something here.

The value proposition is clearer now: blockchain-based settlement can reduce the cost and complexity of managing certain types of assets. Particularly for things like real estate, private credit, and illiquid securities where current settlement processes are expensive and slow.

We’re still early. Regulatory uncertainty remains a real obstacle. But the pilot projects are becoming production systems, and serious institutions are involved.

Identity and Credentials

Here’s an application that took longer than expected to mature but is now reaching interesting territory.

Blockchain-based identity and credential systems can allow people to prove things about themselves without revealing unnecessary information. You could prove you’re over 18 without revealing your exact age. Prove you have a degree without revealing your entire academic record. Prove you’re a licensed professional without creating a centralized database of everyone’s licenses.

The technical infrastructure for this exists now. What’s needed is adoption - institutions willing to issue credentials on-chain, and verifiers willing to accept them.

I’m seeing early momentum in professional credentials and educational certificates. Some universities are issuing degrees as verifiable credentials. Professional associations are experimenting with on-chain certifications. It’s nascent, but the use case is clear.

What’s Still Not Working

I don’t want to oversell the progress. Plenty of Web3 applications remain stuck.

Decentralized social media hasn’t cracked the distribution problem. Mastodon and others have their niche, but network effects still favor the centralized platforms.

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) have governance problems that blockchain doesn’t solve. Voter apathy, plutocratic tendencies (those with most tokens control decisions), and the difficulty of coordinating complex work through on-chain voting all remain unsolved.

NFTs for art and collectibles never recovered from the crash. The speculation was the product, and once it ended, so did the market. There might be legitimate applications for NFTs (as proof of authenticity, as tickets, as access tokens), but art speculation wasn’t it.

DeFi (decentralized finance) remains a casino with occasional useful applications. The yield farming and leveraged trading that dominated during the boom was always unsustainable. What’s left is more modest but perhaps more real - decentralized exchanges, lending protocols that serve as genuine alternatives to centralized services.

The Infrastructure Layer

What’s matured most significantly is the underlying infrastructure.

Layer 2 scaling solutions have dramatically improved transaction throughput and reduced costs on Ethereum. Solana proved that high-performance Layer 1 networks are possible (despite occasional stability issues). Cross-chain bridges, while still security risks, have improved.

Developer tooling has gotten better. Building on blockchain used to require deep cryptographic expertise. Now there are frameworks and services that abstract away much of the complexity.

This infrastructure work is boring but essential. It’s what makes practical applications possible rather than theoretical.

My Current Framework

After years of whiplash between hype and skepticism, here’s how I think about Web3 now:

Strong use cases: Stablecoins for cross-border payments, tokenization of specific asset classes, verifiable credentials. These solve real problems better than existing solutions.

Emerging use cases: Supply chain transparency, digital ownership for specific contexts, decentralized storage. Promising but not yet proven at scale.

Weak use cases: General-purpose decentralization, consumer applications where centralization isn’t actually a problem, anything that requires mass consumer adoption of crypto wallets.

The Web3 maximalist vision of rebuilding all of internet infrastructure on blockchain isn’t happening. But specific applications where the properties of blockchain - permissionless, transparent, programmable - genuinely add value? Those are maturing.

For innovation managers, the practical stance is to identify specific processes in your organization where these properties matter, then evaluate whether the current technology is mature enough to deliver value. Don’t buy into the grand narrative. Look for the specific wins.

The tourists have left. The builders remain. And some of what they’re building is actually useful.