A few days ago, I watched an interview with Jacobs and pondered it several times. What I really want to share with everyone is not the conclusion of "early stage" he mentioned, but the logical framework behind this judgment.

Many people are puzzled—Bitcoin has been around for over ten years, so how can it still be called early? That’s a good question. Let me explain with a very straightforward example: imagine the internet in 1997. At that time, internet speeds were painfully slow, websites were few and far between, and online payments were just a fantasy. But in that year, the global penetration rate of the internet was only 7.5%. What about the next ten years? Monsters like Google and Amazon emerged one after another. Now, the market for crypto assets has a penetration rate also around 7.5%, right at the boundary between innovators and early adopters.

This is no coincidence. According to the rules of innovation diffusion, any new technology needs to go through five stages to become widespread: innovators account for 2.5%, early adopters 13.5%, early majority 34%, late majority 34%, and laggards 16%. The current position of the crypto industry is exactly the same as the internet’s situation in the mid-1990s.

Let’s also look at infrastructure. Where are the bottlenecks of the internet? Network latency, content scarcity, unreliable transaction systems. In the crypto world, on-chain performance, cross-chain interoperability, and asset custody are still very imperfect. Just one security vulnerability can swallow up hundreds of millions of dollars. But on the other hand—because these problems haven’t been solved yet—there is huge room for improvement. These opportunities are where the wealth of the next decade will be.