Jeff Park argued that crypto is entering a phase similar to Nvidia’s pre-mainstream AI era, when the technological shift was visible to early believers but not yet apparent to the broader market. In an X after While defending crypto’s ideological roots on Sunday, Park framed today’s industry as a difficult “middle game” before on-chain capital markets become a natural infrastructure.
Park’s comparison focused on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Elon Musk’s first public appearance together at GTC 2015, a moment he said occurred within a narrow window before AI had become a mainstream consumer or institutional priority. By then, Huang had spent decades supporting parallel graphics processing and backed CUDA since 2006, while Musk had already had what Park called his “Hassabis moment” in 2012. OpenAI, he noted, had not yet been established.
“This is that narrow window where a revolution is visible to some but not to others,” Park wrote, “where both geniuses had early inklings of recognizing AI’s ubiquitous potential, but the general public had not yet been made aware. It would obviously take another decade before it reached mainstream applications.”
Why Crypto Looks Like Nvidia
Park said he sees crypto in a similar position today. Before GPUs became central to the AI boom, the technology was supported by gamers, hobbyists, and researchers who expanded its capabilities without necessarily knowing that they were helping to subsidize a much larger computing transition. In his analogy, early DeFi played a similar role for crypto by subsidizing the development path towards institutional tokenization.
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“Gamers subsidized the development of AI, just as early DeFi subsidized the development of institutional tokenization,” he wrote.
The core of Park’s argument is that the most difficult phase of crypto is not the early ideological phase or the final mature phase. It is the transition phase between them. He borrowed from Elon Musk’s comments about autonomous driving at the GTC 2015, where Musk said the simplest parts are driving at very low speeds, where a vehicle can stop, and driving at high speeds, where the rules are more structured. The most difficult, according to Park, is the zone from 16 to 80 km/h: urban environments with bicycles, children, cones, manholes and edge cases that require both precision and speed.
Park applied that framework to crypto infrastructure. The “0-10 mph” phase was permissionless money, a use case he said people could understand from a practical standpoint. According to him, the ’50 mph+’ phase will consist of on-chain capital markets becoming self-evident for self-custody, capital efficiency, money velocity and settlement optimization. The hard part is what’s in between.
“But it’s the 10-50 that’s tough, where money in a pre-internet financial infrastructure hits AML/KYC, offshore capital channels, discretionary bank risk models and lagging reporting regimes create all kinds of needs for precision and speed that the institutional infrastructure needs to evolve today,” Park wrote. “It is fundamentally solvable, but this is the most challenging part of fulfilling the dreams of on-chain capital markets.”
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Park also drew a distinction between Bitcoin and the broader crypto sector, while rejecting the idea that support for one should exclude the other. He said Bitcoin and crypto are not trying to solve identical problems, even though both stem from a similar ideological impulse around open access.
“I love bitcoin. But contrary to what some think, I believe it is possible to love crypto too, because bitcoin is a monetary experiment made possible by the evolution of technology, while most of crypto is the opposite: a technology experiment made possible by the evolution of money,” he wrote. “They solve fundamentally different problems, although they are rooted in one ideal: making access to it as much as possible a public good.”
Park’s broader thesis is that the ideology behind crypto is not fading, but is changing shape. He described the “winning ideology” as “technological financialization,” a form of hyper-financialization with decentralizing elements that exports state finance, agentic rails and self-determination as public goods.
That framing matters because much of the current debate in the industry focuses on whether the industrialization of crypto weakens its original purpose. Park’s answer is that the ideological layer remains essential, but the practical expression of that ideology now moves through the financial infrastructure, symbolic markets and systems that must interact with existing compliance and banking regimes.
“This ‘middle game’ period will go down in history as the most critical moment for the industry,” Park wrote, adding that the future belongs to “those who recognized that it was always ideological.”
At the time of writing, the total crypto market capitalization was $2.55 trillion.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com