A couple of weeks ago, World’s Alex Blania unveiled the company’s latest plans to a room full of crypto industry insiders. The U.S. debut — riding a friendlier regulatory breeze — is noteworthy, but the real plot twist is World’s sprint toward the mainstream and what that signals for crypto’s own leap from early-adopter clubhouse to everyday commerce.

World’s wager is undeniably bold — convincing Americans to swap an iris scan for a cryptographic “I’m human” badge is no easy sell, privacy guarantees or not, and might be early — but the team has quietly de-risked the plan on several fronts in recent years (details below).

What lessons can crypto founders and builders take from World’s evolution?

World used to lean heavily on its crypto token to drive adoption. But that strategy — often hailed as Bitcoin’s winning formula and copied endlessly — gets the cause and effect all wrong. It also sparked unintended consequences, as World discovered during its early rollouts, attracting sharp criticism from privacy advocates and others who argued that outsized incentives eclipsed real utility for early adopters.

Bitcoin scaled because it introduced a neutral, fixed-supply asset answerable to no central bank. Sure, mining rewards and moon-shot price hopes drew speculators, later joined by institutional investors and a few sovereigns — but Bitcoin’s lasting builders were hooked on its radical potential as a new kind of asset and payment system, not just a get-rich-quick scheme. Since then we’ve watched thousands of copy-paste tokens try the same trick, and most now shuffle through the crypto-zombie graveyard.

Crypto isn’t above the fundamental laws of economics. Like any startup, crypto projects need to build genuine utility first, then use tokens to speed up adoption or address market failures in their ecosystem. In short, while economists may be eager to play engineer, their ideas shine most when a project already has some traction.

By pointing to dating, gaming, and credit — arenas where bots now mingle freely with humans — Blania framed World’s proof-of-personhood as the fix, and explained why trading an iris scan to the orb might be a wager worth taking.

It’s no shock that World, co-founded and chaired by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, is tackling this issue: As AI grows more sophisticated, the need for a reliable, cryptographically secure way to prove someone’s human will become critical. World may be outpacing the trend, but it’s tackling a huge societal challenge we’ll all face soon. (For a solid primer on this, check out Eddy Lazzarin’s posts.)

Back in crypto’s early days, we were all swept up in the hype. When I designed the Bitcoin experiment at MIT, I genuinely believed crypto would transform payments and financial services in just a couple of years. A decade later, we’re only just getting started.

Delivering real utility outside the crypto bubble means matching the user experience consumers and businesses already get from traditional solutions. And yes, that requires building a bridge between old and new rails — often through compromises that look downright irrational to crypto purists. 

You can’t skip the awkward stretch where new and old rails overlap — what Andreas Antonopoulos calls “infrastructure inversion.” Picture 56k modems hijacking analog phone lines in the ’90s or the first cars rattling down horse-grade gravel roads.

This stage puts new technology at a real disadvantage, limiting it to narrow, point solutions rather than sweeping, system-wide change — for a sharp take on this in AI, check out Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, and Joshua Gans’ work. The broader ecosystem needs to shift and adapt before the technology can truly shine.

Early World tried to skip the inversion phase, making the token the star. Yesterday’s reboot flips the script: it leans into the infrastructure-inversion playbook and on shipping real utility first. 

You still can’t ship a best-in-class, truly global wallet without latching onto the old rails. On-ramps and off-ramps need to feel effortless — PayPal’s magic when online payments felt dicey — and that seamless flow is what any crypto wallet needs to crack the mainstream. 

That’s where the World App’s tie-ins with Stripe and a Visa card stand out, delivering familiarity, trust, and instant utility from day one. That need for backwards compatibility also keeps incumbents in play, letting them track new players and roll out fresh services before they’re left behind.

The same dynamic is moving crypto into the back office of cross-border payments for businesses and consumers alike. Long term, the tech may step into the spotlight, but for now it has to coexist with legacy rails to smooth adoption and kill friction. Plenty of crypto concepts — economics included — shine at scale, but without a user-friendly onramp, they stall before hitting that mark.

Like any new technology, crypto is far from inevitable — no matter what its boosters claim. More precisely, decentralization — crypto’s core principle and its most significant contribution to reshaping markets — is far from a sure thing.

Stablecoins show how crypto’s need to link with traditional systems gave rise to a useful tool, yet they risk reintroducing centralized control and walled-off networks into what’s supposed to be an open financial stack. I’m betting the open architecture wins — otherwise, what’s the point? — but entrenched players have incentives to block it.

Blania and his team are wagering that consumers will value decentralized control of their data — and that businesses will build better experiences on top of it. I’ve written before about the challenges of decentralized identity disrupting the status quo, and how centralized players begin with a clear edge in user experience and functionality. To leapfrog those incumbents, World first has to persuade users to entrust it with their biometrics. With the U.S. rollout underway, we’ll soon see whether the team struck the right trust-versus-convenience balance.

One could imagine a gentler on-ramp: offer an instantly useful perk — a familiar verified badge that unlocks extra features in apps people already love — before asking anyone to peer into the orb. The trade-off, of course, is a weaker proof of identity that begs to be abused.

Blania may be right that, in an endless cat-and-mouse with AI, bullet-grade biometrics will be the only rock-solid proof of personhood. Still, he could have eased users in rather than marching them straight to the orb on day one. Airdrop chasers might line up for tokens, but that sugar high fades once the subsidies stop. Sustainable momentum blossoms when you deliver tangible, everyday value — and that’s where the real upside awaits. World App’s payments experience — paired with frictionless, global on- and off-ramps — may well provide exactly that.

With an aggressive rollout on the calendar, we’ll soon see whether crypto can break into the mainstream — particularly if World can prove that cryptography means privacy and convenience. Apple nailed this with Face ID by cutting seconds from every unlock; Clear did it by pointing travelers to shorter TSA lines. World will need to deliver a similarly obvious “oh-wow” moment the very first time someone taps pay

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Regardless of how the World experiment plays out, my hope is that more crypto teams will tilt the spotlight away from token economics and blinking price tickers and toward building products people actually use every day — because that decidedly unglamorous pivot is the bridge the industry must cross if it ever wants a seat at the mainstream table.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Forbes.com.

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Christian Cataini is the co-founder of Lightspark and the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab.

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