The Shortening Replacement Cycle and Crypto
Crypto turned finance into code. AI will do the rest.
Vitalik wrote something really interesting last week: Ethereum has finally become a high bandwidth network without sacrificing decentralization or consensus enabled by zkEVMs.
In parallel, apparently some of you still needed convincing? Opus 4.5 is the technical leap that finally sold the general public on coding agents.
I’ll spare you the subjective tweets (but I promise, it does one shot things pretty well) and just share this chart:
One of the things crypto does really well is turn nearly all aspects of finance/fintech into code writing (and auditing) problems:
Need servers? Program crypto-economic incentives for other people to run nodes.
Need guaranteed payment? Use an audited smart contract.
Need liquidity? Write a Uniswap v4 hook and program it.
Need to accept payments? Use a wallet SKD.
Need to integrate another service? Just look at the ABI of the contract.
etc.
And the happy accident of this decade is that coding agents are now really good becomes really convenient in this context.
Do you bet on the financial rails that turns everything into a coding problem or on the financial rails that still requires people, paperwork and process?
It’s probably not an accident that even the Ethereum ecosystem that has had its problems with core development velocity and resourcing is shipping faster than ever (especially in aggregate with the L2+ ecosystem).
Anything that is ultimately a computer science or coding problem is going to get solved faster and faster.
I've been making this shift on a personal tool level and wrote about how I stopped using no code tools even for agent building:
This was until recently my go-to driver. Getting the ease of a no-code tool but the ability to jump in, inspect each component and write custom ones is truly great. Things that are simple to write in code are not always easy to build in a No-code tool like n8n or Langflow.
But that’s not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that you can’t get AI to help you build your pipelines.
I want to vibe code my AI pipeline.
I want to be building in Cursor or Windsurf, not dragging boxes around.
No-code pipelines are also not portable. These tools will evolve quickly and I expect to need to constantly migrate and upgrade our agents from one setup to another.
In the words of Douglas Engelbart: we need tools that help us build better tools.
While us developers may be early to the transition:
Companies won't sleep on it for too long.